Re: profile patch for 2.1.114

[Linus Torvalds]

On Tue, 4 Aug 1998, Damacus Porteng wrote:
>
> My personal thoughts are that it should be handled by sysctl like
> ip_forwarding and the barage of others.
> 
> echo "2">/proc/sys/kernel/profiling (for example) would be pretty nice

I agree that it would be nice, but the problem is that the profile buffer
needs to be pretty large in order to get instruction-level profiles, and
you can't allocate it except at bootup time. 

Note that a lot of the stuff that is CONFIG_PROFILE'd away is in the init
section of the kernel anyway, so it would never take up any space when
running as it is. So the only real cost of profiling is a test that is
done by the timer interrupt. 

		Linus