New Linux 5.14 Tracer To Help With Measuring Operating System Noise

Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Kernel on 5 July 2021 at 07:33 AM EDT. 3 Comments
LINUX KERNEL
The tracing subsystem within the Linux kernel is seeing some exciting improvements with Linux 5.14 to help with low-latency analysis and also measuring operating system noise.

Linux 5.14 brings a new "osnoise" tracer for measuring noise attributed to the operating system and hardware when it comes to isolated applications. The OSNoise tracer keeps track of noise by monitoring entry points for NMIs / IRQs / SoftIRQs / threads in determining if the noise is coming from the OS or rather than hardware. There are also tracepoints setup for helping to further debug sources of noise.

In addition, the tracing work for Linux 5.14 brings "hwlat" improvements for that hardware latency debugging. The big change there is now allowing hwlat to run on multiple CPUs in parallel rather than its prior limitation of running on a single CPU at a time.

More details on the OSNoise tracer via this documentation. The list of other tracing subsystem updates for this kernel can be found via this Git merge.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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