• Steven Rostedt's avatar
    tracing: add tracing_on/tracing_off to kernel.h · 2002c258
    Steven Rostedt authored
    Impact: cleanup
    
    The functions tracing_start/tracing_stop have been moved to kernel.h.
    These are not the functions a developer most likely wants to use
    when they want to insert a place to stop tracing and restart it from
    user space.
    
    tracing_start/tracing_stop was created to work with things like
    suspend to ram, where even calling smp_processor_id() can crash the
    system. The tracing_start/tracing_stop was used to stop the tracer from
    doing anything. These are still light weight functions, but add a bit
    more overhead to be able to stop the tracers. They also have no interface
    back to userland. That is, if the kernel calls tracing_stop, userland
    can not start tracing.
    
    What a developer most likely wants to use is tracing_on/tracing_off.
    These are very light weight functions (simply sets or clears a bit).
    These functions just stop recording into the ring buffer. The tracers
    don't even know that this happens except that they would receive NULL
    from the ring_buffer_lock_reserve function.
    
    Also, there's a way for the user land to enable or disable this bit.
    In debugfs/tracing/tracing_on, a user may echo "0" (same as tracing_off())
    or echo "1" (same as tracing_on()) into this file. This becomes handy when
    a kernel developer is debugging and wants tracing to turn off when it
    hits an anomaly. Then the developer can examine the trace, and restart
    tracing if they want to try again (echo 1 > tracing_on).
    
    This patch moves the prototypes for tracing_on/tracing_off to kernel.h
    and comments their use, so that a kernel developer will know how
    to use them.
    Signed-off-by: default avatarSteven Rostedt <srostedt@redhat.com>
    2002c258
kernel.h 19.5 KB