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ring-buffer: document reader page design 

In a private email conversation I explained how the ring buffer
page worked by using silly ASCII art. Ingo suggested that I add
that to the comments of the code.

Here it is.

Requested-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Signed-off-by: Steven Rostedt <srostedt@redhat.com>
hifive-unleashed-5.1
Steven Rostedt 2009-03-12 22:24:17 -04:00
parent f28e55765e
commit 5cc9854888
1 changed files with 68 additions and 0 deletions
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68
kernel/trace/ring_buffer.c
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@ -21,6 +21,74 @@
#include "trace.h"
/*
* The ring buffer is made up of a list of pages. A separate list of pages is
* allocated for each CPU. A writer may only write to a buffer that is
* associated with the CPU it is currently executing on. A reader may read
* from any per cpu buffer.
*
* The reader is special. For each per cpu buffer, the reader has its own
* reader page. When a reader has read the entire reader page, this reader
* page is swapped with another page in the ring buffer.
*
* Now, as long as the writer is off the reader page, the reader can do what
* ever it wants with that page. The writer will never write to that page
* again (as long as it is out of the ring buffer).
*
* Here's some silly ASCII art.
*
* +------+
* |reader| RING BUFFER
* |page |
* +------+ +---+ +---+ +---+
* | |-->| |-->| |
* +---+ +---+ +---+
* ^ |
* | |
* +---------------+
*
*
* +------+
* |reader| RING BUFFER
* |page |------------------v
* +------+ +---+ +---+ +---+
* | |-->| |-->| |
* +---+ +---+ +---+
* ^ |
* | |
* +---------------+
*
*
* +------+
* |reader| RING BUFFER
* |page |------------------v
* +------+ +---+ +---+ +---+
* ^ | |-->| |-->| |
* | +---+ +---+ +---+
* | |
* | |
* +------------------------------+
*
*
* +------+
* |buffer| RING BUFFER
* |page |------------------v
* +------+ +---+ +---+ +---+
* ^ | | | |-->| |
* | New +---+ +---+ +---+
* | Reader------^ |
* | page |
* +------------------------------+
*
*
* After we make this swap, the reader can hand this page off to the splice
* code and be done with it. It can even allocate a new page if it needs to
* and swap that into the ring buffer.
*
* We will be using cmpxchg soon to make all this lockless.
*
*/
/*
* A fast way to enable or disable all ring buffers is to
* call tracing_on or tracing_off. Turning off the ring buffers