criticalstat_example.txt

Demonstrations of criticalstat: Find long atomic critical sections in the kernel.

criticalstat traces and reports occurrences of atomic critical sections in the
kernel with useful stacktraces showing the origin of them. Such critical
sections frequently occur due to use of spinlocks, or if interrupts or
preemption were explicitly disabled by a driver. IRQ routines in Linux are also
executed with interrupts disabled. There are many reasons. Such critical
sections are a source of long latency/responsive issues for real-time systems.

This works by probing the preempt/irq and cpuidle tracepoints in the kernel.
Since this uses BPF, only the root user can use this tool. Further, the kernel
has to be built with certain CONFIG options enabled inorder for it to work:
CONFIG_PREEMPTIRQ_EVENTS before kernel 4.19
CONFIG_PREEMPTIRQ_TRACEPOINTS in kernel 4.19 and later
CONFIG_DEBUG_PREEMPT
CONFIG_PREEMPT_TRACER
Additionally, the following options should be turned off on older kernels:
CONFIG_PROVE_LOCKING
CONFIG_LOCKDEP

USAGE:
# ./criticalstat -h
usage: criticalstat [-h] [-p] [-i] [-d DURATION]

Trace long critical sections

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            Show this help message and exit
  -p, --preemptoff      Find long sections where preemption was off
  -i, --irqoff          Find long sections where IRQ was off
  -d DURATION, --duration DURATION
                        Duration in uS (microseconds) below which we filter

examples:
    ./criticalstat          	# run with default options: irq off for more than 100 uS
    ./criticalstat -p       	# find sections with preemption disabled for more than 100 uS
    ./criticalstat -d 500   	# find sections with IRQs disabled for more than 500 uS
    ./criticalstat -p -d 500	# find sections with preemption disabled for more than 500 uS

The tool runs continuously until interrupted by Ctrl-C


By default, criticalstat finds IRQ disable sections for > 100us.

# ./criticalstat
Finding critical section with IRQ disabled for > 100us
===================================
TASK: kworker/u16:5 (pid  5903 tid  5903) Total Time: 194.427  us

Section start: __schedule -> schedule
Section end:   _raw_spin_unlock_irq -> finish_task_switch
  trace_hardirqs_on+0xdc
  trace_hardirqs_on+0xdc
  _raw_spin_unlock_irq+0x18
  finish_task_switch+0xf0
  __schedule+0x8c8
  preempt_schedule_irq+0x38
  el1_preempt+0x8
===================================


If too many sections are showing up, the user can raise the threshold to only
show critical sections that are > 500us by passing "-d" option:

# ./criticalstat -d 500
Finding critical section with IRQ disabled for > 500us
===================================
TASK: crtc_commit:111 (pid   246 tid   246) Total Time: 580.730  us

Section start: clk_enable_lock -> clk_enable
Section end:   _raw_spin_unlock_irqrestore -> clk_enable
  trace_hardirqs_on+0xdc
  trace_hardirqs_on+0xdc
  _raw_spin_unlock_irqrestore+0x24
  clk_enable+0x80
  msm_dss_enable_clk+0x7c
  sde_power_resource_enable+0x578
  _sde_crtc_vblank_enable_no_lock+0x68
  sde_crtc_vblank+0x8c
  sde_kms_enable_vblank+0x18
  vblank_ctrl_worker+0xd0
  kthread_worker_fn+0xf8
  kthread+0x114
  ret_from_fork+0x10
===================================


If instead of irq disabled sections, we want to see preempt disabled sections,
then pass the "-p" option. Below we try to find preempt-disabled critical
sections that are > 500us.

# ./criticalstat -p -d 500
Finding critical section with preempt disabled for > 500us
===================================
TASK: swapper/1 (pid     0 tid     0) Total Time: 618.437  us

Section start: preempt_count_add -> preempt_count_add
Section end:   preempt_count_sub -> preempt_count_sub
  trace_preempt_on+0x98
  trace_preempt_on+0x98
  preempt_latency_stop+0x164
  preempt_count_sub+0x50
  schedule+0x74
  schedule_preempt_disabled+0x14
  cpu_startup_entry+0x84
  secondary_start_kernel+0x1c8
  [unknown]
===================================


criticalstat -p can also reflect kernel scheduler issues sometimes. These may
show up as long preempt-off sections if the functions in the scheduler take a
long time to run (such as pick_next_task_fair which selects the CPU for a task

Follow is a report showing a preempt-off latency of 700us during the schedule
loop's execution:

===================================
TASK: irq/296-cs35l36 (pid   666 tid   666) Total Time: 732.657  us

Section start: schedule -> schedule
Section end:   schedule -> schedule
  trace_preempt_on+0x98
  trace_preempt_on+0x98
  preempt_count_sub+0xa4
  schedule+0x78
  schedule_timeout+0x80
  wait_for_common+0xb4
  wait_for_completion_timeout+0x28
  geni_i2c_xfer+0x298
  __i2c_transfer+0x4e0
  i2c_transfer+0x8
  irq_thread_fn+0x2c
  irq_thread+0x160
  kthread+0x118
  ret_from_fork+0x10
===================================


See Also: Linux kernel's preemptoff and irqoff tracers which provide similar
tracing but with some limitations.