tracing/filters: allow on-the-fly filter switching

This patch allows event filters to be safely removed or switched
on-the-fly while avoiding the use of rcu or the suspension of tracing of
previous versions.

It does it by adding a new filter_pred_none() predicate function which
does nothing and by never deallocating either the predicates or any of
the filter_pred members used in matching; the predicate lists are
allocated and initialized during ftrace_event_calls initialization.

Whenever a filter is removed or replaced, the filter_pred_* functions
currently in use by the affected ftrace_event_call are immediately
switched over to to the filter_pred_none() function, while the rest of
the filter_pred members are left intact, allowing any currently
executing filter_pred_* functions to finish up, using the values they're
currently using.

In the case of filter replacement, the new predicate values are copied
into the old predicates after the above step, and the filter_pred_none()
functions are replaced by the filter_pred_* functions for the new
filter.  In this case, it is possible though very unlikely that a
previous filter_pred_* is still running even after the
filter_pred_none() switch and the switch to the new filter_pred_*.  In
that case, however, because nothing has been deallocated in the
filter_pred, the worst that can happen is that the old filter_pred_*
function sees the new values and as a result produces either a false
positive or a false negative, depending on the values it finds.

So one downside to this method is that rarely, it can produce a bad
match during the filter switch, but it should be possible to live with
that, IMHO.

The other downside is that at least in this patch the predicate lists
are always pre-allocated, taking up memory from the start.  They could
probably be allocated on first-use, and de-allocated when tracing is
completely stopped - if this patch makes sense, I could create another
one to do that later on.

Oh, and it also places a restriction on the size of __arrays in events,
currently set to 128, since they can't be larger than the now embedded
str_val arrays in the filter_pred struct.

Signed-off-by: Tom Zanussi <tzanussi@gmail.com>
Acked-by: Frederic Weisbecker <fweisbec@gmail.com>
Cc: Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org>
Cc: paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com
LKML-Reference: <1239610670.6660.49.camel@tropicana>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>

0 files changed, 0 insertions, 0 deletions