tracing: add a new workqueue tracer

Impact: new tracer

The workqueue tracer provides some statistical informations
about each cpu workqueue thread such as the number of the
works inserted and executed since their creation. It can help
to evaluate the amount of work each of them have to perform.
For example it can help a developer to decide whether he should
choose a per cpu workqueue instead of a singlethreaded one.

It only traces statistical informations for now but it will probably later
provide event tracing too.

Such a tracer could help too, and be improved, to help rt priority sorted
workqueue development.

To have a snapshot of the workqueues state at any time, just do

cat /debugfs/tracing/trace_stat/workqueues

Ie:

  1    125        125       reiserfs/1
  1      0          0       scsi_tgtd/1
  1      0          0       aio/1
  1      0          0       ata/1
  1    114        114       kblockd/1
  1      0          0       kintegrityd/1
  1   2147       2147       events/1

  0      0          0       kpsmoused
  0    105        105       reiserfs/0
  0      0          0       scsi_tgtd/0
  0      0          0       aio/0
  0      0          0       ata_aux
  0      0          0       ata/0
  0      0          0       cqueue
  0      0          0       kacpi_notify
  0      0          0       kacpid
  0    149        149       kblockd/0
  0      0          0       kintegrityd/0
  0   1000       1000       khelper
  0   2270       2270       events/0

Changes in V2:

_ Drop the static array based on NR_CPU and dynamically allocate the stat array
  with num_possible_cpus() and other cpu mask facilities....
_ Trace workqueue insertion at a bit lower level (insert_work instead of queue_work) to handle
  even the workqueue barriers.

Signed-off-by: Frederic Weisbecker <fweisbec@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Steven Rostedt <srostedt@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>

1 files changed, 11 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/kernel/trace/Kconfig b/kernel/trace/Kconfig
index 944239296f13..dde1d46f77e5 100644
--- a/kernel/trace/Kconfig
+++ b/kernel/trace/Kconfig
@@ -284,6 +284,17 @@ config KMEMTRACE
 
           If unsure, say N.
 
+config WORKQUEUE_TRACER
+        bool "Trace workqueues"
+        select TRACING
+        help
+          The workqueue tracer provides some statistical informations
+          about each cpu workqueue thread such as the number of the
+          works inserted and executed since their creation. It can help
+          to evaluate the amount of work each of them have to perform.
+          For example it can help a developer to decide whether he should
+          choose a per cpu workqueue instead of a singlethreaded one.
+
 
 config DYNAMIC_FTRACE
         bool "enable/disable ftrace tracepoints dynamically"