Messages in this thread | | | Subject | Re: [PATCH V2 00/10] perf script: Add API for filtering via dynamically loaded shared object | From | Andi Kleen <> | Date | Mon, 28 Jun 2021 07:57:03 -0700 |
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On 6/28/2021 12:23 AM, Adrian Hunter wrote: > On 27/06/21 7:13 pm, Andi Kleen wrote: >> On 6/27/2021 6:18 AM, Adrian Hunter wrote: >>> Hi In some cases, users want to filter very large amounts of data >>> (e.g. from AUX area tracing like Intel PT) looking for something >>> specific. While scripting such as Python can be used, Python is 10 >>> to 20 times slower than C. So define a C API so that custom filters >>> can be written and loaded. >> While I appreciate this for complex cases, in my experience filtering >> is usually just a simple expression. It would be nice to also have a >> way to do this reasonably fast without having to write a custom C > I do not agree that writing C filters is a hassle e.g. a minimal do-nothing > filter is only a few lines:
It still doesn't seem user friendly. Maybe it's obvious to you, but I suspect we left behind most of even the sophisticated perf users here.
> >> Maybe we could have some kind of python fast path >> just for filters? > I expect there are ways to make it more efficient, but I doubt it would ever > come close to C.
If it's within 2-3x I guess it would be ok. For any larger data files we should parallelize anyways, and that works fine with the --time x/y method (although it usually also needs some custom scripting, perhaps need to figure out how to make it more user friendly)
> >> just for filters? Or maybe the alternative would be to have a >> frontend in perf that can automatically generate/compile such a C >> filter based on a simple expression, but I'm not sure if that would >> be much simpler. > If gcc is available, perf script could, in fact, build the .so on the fly > since the compile time is very quick. > > Another point is that filters can be used for more than just filtering. > Here is an example which sums cycles per-cpu and prints them, and the difference > to the last print, at the beginning of each line. I think this was something > you were interested in doing?
Yes that's great and useful, but I would prefer to not maintain custom plugins for it. Often when I write a script it has to run in all kinds of weird environments that some random person installed, and it's not clear how portable building C will be there. And I doubt I can just copy the .so files around.
BTW I'm not arguing to not do the plugin (I can imagine extreme cases where such a plugin is the best option), but really for most of these things there should be easier and more portable alternatives, even if they are slightly slower.
-Andi
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