> > I'll genuinely take on board advice on how I can profile all the system
> > via x86 perf counters efficiently without having to patch the kernel.
> > The old way just uses sys_call_table. So what do I do now ?
>
> The obvious thing is to represent it as a device. I'm not familiar enough
> with the existing perfctr work to know how well that works out.
The system call tracking is only used to associate a particular EIP with
a particular offset in some binary image. There's no other efficient
method to capture the mmap() calls for these images, for everything
running. ptrace() is only really useful for a small number of processes,
and is slow. Offline post-analysis isn't possible. There is no
API for getting access to this information.
Removing sys_call_table from exports won't have any positive effect.
Using it has always been "well, you're on your own" - if there is a
really good reason it needs to be changed, fine; but just changing it
because it's not supposed to be used isn't a good enough reason when
there is actually a couple of niche cases where it's the only option.
imho,
john
-- "I never understood what's so hard about picking a unique first and last name - and not going beyond the 6 character limit." - Toon Moene - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/