ftrace: Consider shared max priority in latency histograms

The algorithm used so far to trace the process with the highest priority
requires that no other processes with the same priority are being woken
up simultaneously. Otherwise, a process with a lower priority may be
picked up for tracing which leads to an erroneously high latency value.

Generally, the wakeup latency of a process that exclusively uses the
highest priority of the system is due to software or hardware issues we
would like to solve or, at least, keep as small as possible. This is
what latency measurements are made for, after all. The wakeup latency of
a process that shares the highest priority of the system with other
processes, is quite another story. It may contain the worst-case runtime
durations of the other processes; thus, it is the result of the priority
design of a given system and nothing a kernel developer or hardware
engineer may want to fix.

This said, we need to separately record latencies i) of processes that
exclusively use the highest priority of the system and ii) of processes
that share the highest priority of the system with other processes.

The above mentioned shortcoming of the tracing algorithm also applies to
the variable tracing_max_latency that the wakeup latency tracer uses,
since it is based on the same procedure as the original version of the
latency histogram. In consequence, if several processes share the
highest priority of the system, the variable tracing_max_latency may
contain erroneously high values. We could now patch the wakeup latency
tracer as well and separately record the various latencies, but we
better document this behavior and recommend the latency histograms to
reliably determine a system's worst-case wakeup latency.

Simplified and cleaned up a bit. Added some more help info to Kconfig.

Signed-off-by: Carsten Emde <C.Emde@osadl.org>
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>

1 files changed, 3 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/include/linux/sched.h b/include/linux/sched.h
index c231a2467a83..676126d56894 100644
--- a/include/linux/sched.h
+++ b/include/linux/sched.h
@@ -1548,6 +1548,9 @@ struct task_struct {
         unsigned long trace;
         /* bitmask of trace recursion */
         unsigned long trace_recursion;
+#ifdef CONFIG_WAKEUP_LATENCY_HIST
+        u64 preempt_timestamp_hist;
+#endif
 #endif /* CONFIG_TRACING */
 #ifdef CONFIG_PREEMPT_RT
         /*