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I'm no hardware nut, but..

Posted Oct 2, 2008 21:51 UTC (Thu) by fuhchee (subscriber, #40059)
In reply to: I'm no hardware nut, but.. by Oddscurity
Parent article: Low-level tracing plumbing

> Not only that, but it'll possibly be just the packing. Unpacking and
> collating data can be done in userspace, and possibly offline after enough
> trace data's been collected.

OTOH, Linus wanted to people to be able to use this tracing stuff with
just a cat/grep, which seems to eschew *requiring* special userspace tools
for unpacking.

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Posted Oct 3, 2008 23:31 UTC (Fri) by tbird20d (subscriber, #1901) [Link]

It could still be kernel code doing the unpacking, just not at trace-time. This preserves the ability to use cat & grep, while still omitting the unpacking overhead during trace itself.

I'm no hardware nut, but..

Posted Oct 3, 2008 23:43 UTC (Fri) by fuhchee (subscriber, #40059) [Link]

> It could still be kernel code doing the unpacking, just not at trace-time.

If the kernel isn't going to host huge history buffers, then
conversions will in general have to be done essentially online,
probably deferred only a bit.