The per-PSB packet decoding logic was wrong because it was assuming that pt_insn_get_sync_offset was being udpated after every PSB. Silly me, that is not true. It returns the offset of the PSB packet after invoking pt_insn_sync_forward regardless of how many PSBs are visited later. Instead, I'm now following the approach described in https://github.com/intel/libipt/blob/master/doc/howto_libipt.md#parallel-decode for parallel decoding, which is basically what we need.
A nasty error that happened because of this is that when we had two PSBs (A and B), the following was happening
1. PSB A was processed all the way up to the end of the trace, which includes PSB B.
2. PSB B was then processed until the end of the trace.
The instructions emitted by step 2. were also emitted as part of step 1. so our trace had duplicated chunks. This problem becomes worse when you many PSBs.
As part of making sure this diff is correct, I added some other features that are very useful.
- Added a "synchronization point" event to the TraceCursor, so we can inspect when PSBs are emitted.
- Removed the single-thread decoder. Now the per-cpu decoder and single-thread decoder use the same code paths.
- Use the query decoder to fetch PSBs and timestamps. It turns out that the pt_insn_sync_forward of the instruction decoder can move past several PSBs (this means that we could skip some TSCs). On the other hand, the pt_query_sync_forward method doesn't skip PSBs, so we can get more accurate sync events and timing information.
- Turned LibiptDecoder into PSBBlockDecoder, which decodes single PSB blocks. It is the fundamental processing unit for decoding.
- Added many comments, asserts and improved error handling for clarity.
- Improved DecodeSystemWideTraceForThread so that a TSC is emitted always before a cpu change event. This was a bug that was annoying me before.
- SplitTraceInContinuousExecutions and FindLowestTSCInTrace are now using the query decoder, which can identify precisely each PSB along with their TSCs.
- Added an "only-events" option to the trace dumper to inspect only events.
I did extensive testing and I think we should have an in-house testing CI. The LLVM buildbots are not capable of supporting testing post-mortem traces of hundreds of megabytes. I'll leave that for later, but at least for now the current tests were able to catch most of the issues I encountered when doing this task.
A sample output of a program that I was single stepping is the following. You can see that only one PSB is emitted even though stepping happened!
```
thread #1: tid = 3578223
0: (event) trace synchronization point [offset = 0x0xef0]
a.out`main + 20 at main.cpp:29:20
1: 0x0000000000402479 leaq -0x1210(%rbp), %rax
2: (event) software disabled tracing
3: 0x0000000000402480 movq %rax, %rdi
4: (event) software disabled tracing
5: (event) software disabled tracing
6: 0x0000000000402483 callq 0x403bd4 ; std::vector<int, std::allocator<int>>::vector at stl_vector.h:391:7
7: (event) software disabled tracing
a.out`std::vector<int, std::allocator<int>>::vector() at stl_vector.h:391:7
8: 0x0000000000403bd4 pushq %rbp
9: (event) software disabled tracing
10: 0x0000000000403bd5 movq %rsp, %rbp
11: (event) software disabled tracing
```
This is another trace of a long program with a few PSBs.
```
(lldb) thread trace dump instructions -E -f thread #1: tid = 3603082
0: (event) trace synchronization point [offset = 0x0x80]
47417: (event) software disabled tracing
129231: (event) trace synchronization point [offset = 0x0x800]
146747: (event) software disabled tracing
246076: (event) software disabled tracing
259068: (event) trace synchronization point [offset = 0x0xf78]
259276: (event) software disabled tracing
259278: (event) software disabled tracing
no more data
```
Differential Revision: https://reviews.llvm.org/D131630
Pavel Labath taught me that clang-format sorts headers automatically
using llvm's rules, and it's better not to have spaces between
So in this diff I'm removing those spaces and formatting them as well.
I used `clang-format -i` to format these files.
Thanks to ymeng@fb.com for coming up with this change.
`thread trace dump info` can dump some metrics that can be useful for
analyzing the performance and quality of a trace. This diff adds a --json
option for dumping this information in json format that can be easily
understood my machines.
Differential Revision: https://reviews.llvm.org/D129332
It turns out that cgroup filtering is relatively trivial and works
really nicely. Thid diffs adds automatic cgroup filtering when in
per-cpu mode, unless a new --disable-cgroup-filtering flag is passed in
the start command. At least on Meta machines, all processes are spawned
inside a cgroup by default, which comes super handy, because per cpu
tracing is now much more precise.
A manual test gave me this result
- Without filtering:
Total number of trace items: 36083
Total number of continuous executions found: 229
Number of continuous executions for this thread: 2
Total number of PSB blocks found: 98
Number of PSB blocks for this thread 2
Total number of unattributed PSB blocks found: 38
- With filtering:
Total number of trace items: 87756
Total number of continuous executions found: 123
Number of continuous executions for this thread: 2
Total number of PSB blocks found: 10
Number of PSB blocks for this thread 3
Total number of unattributed PSB blocks found: 2
Filtering gives us great results. The number of instructions collected
more than double (probalby because we have less noise in the trace), and
we have much less unattributed PSBs blocks and unrelated PSBs in
general. The ones that are unrelated probably belong to other processes
in the same cgroup.
Differential Revision: https://reviews.llvm.org/D129257
This metric was missing. We were only measuring in per-thread mode, and
this completes the work.
For a sample trace I have, the `dump info` command shows
```
Timing for this thread:
Decoding instructions: 0.12s
```
I also improved a bit the TaskTime function so that callers don't need to
specify the template argument
Differential Revision: https://reviews.llvm.org/D129249
We want to include events with metadata, like context switches, and this
requires the API to handle events with payloads (e.g. information about
such context switches). Besides this, we want to support multiple
similar events between two consecutive instructions, like multiple
context switches. However, the current implementation is not good for this because
we are defining events as bitmask enums associated with specific
instructions. Thus, we need to decouple instructions from events and
make events actual items in the trace, just like instructions and
errors.
- Add accessors in the TraceCursor to know if an item is an event or not
- Modify from the TraceDumper all the way to DecodedThread to support
- Renamed the paused event to disabled.
- Improved the tsc handling logic. I was using an API for getting the tsc from libipt, but that was an overkill that should be used when not processing events manually, but as we are already processing events, we can more easily get the tscs.
event items. Fortunately this simplified many things
- As part of this refactor, I also fixed and long stating issue, which is that some non decoding errors were being inserted in the decoded thread. I changed this so that TraceIntelPT::Decode returns an error if the decoder couldn't be set up proplerly. Then, errors within a trace are actual anomalies found in between instrutions.
All test pass
Differential Revision: https://reviews.llvm.org/D128576
Having a member variable TraceIntelPT * makes it look as if it was
optional. I'm using instead a weak_ptr to indicate that it's not
optional and the object is under the ownership of TraceIntelPT.
Besides that, I've simplified the Perf aux and data buffers copying by
using vector.insert.
I'm also renaming Lookup2 to Lookup. The 2 in the name is confusing.
Differential Revision: https://reviews.llvm.org/D127881
As discusses offline with @jj10305, we are updating some naming used throughout the code, specially in the json schema
- traceBuffer -> iptTrace
- core -> cpu
Differential Revision: https://reviews.llvm.org/D127817
