I don't think anyone disagrees that measuring latency is a bad idea. Note Brendan's comments in http://osnews.com/permalink?296801 <http://osnews.com/permalink?296801>
"Encouraging customers to look at latencies for performance analysis is really important." ... "If this tool does get customers to think more carefully about latency metrics, then that will certainly be valuable. All roads lead to DTrace." However forcing people to patch their kernel to do it is not going to attract neophytes, no matter how simply the user space tool is. That's the beauty of dynamic tracing systems. You can answer questions that the original designers of the OS didn't anticipate (or had time to think about) that you would ask. Cheers, Colin Aubrey Li wrote: On Jan 19, 2008 10:30 AM, Roman Shaposhnik <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Fri, 2008-01-18 at 16:33 -0500, Colin Burgess wrote: > > I see Intel has released a new tool. Oh, it requires some patches to > > the kernel to record > > latency times. Good thing people don't mind patching their kernels, eh? > > > > So who can write the equivalent latencytop.d the fastest? ;-) > > > > http://www.latencytop.org/ <http://www.latencytop.org/> > > What I find interesting about these projects that Intel > spawns for Linux (PowerTOP, LatencyTOP and couple of others) > is that regardless of internal implementation they are > very useful end user tools. Here at Sun we seem to be > missing interest in creating such things. Which is a bit of a > shame. They are ideal vehicles for disseminating DTrace > knowledge and exposing neophytes to the raw power of DTrace. > > To be fair Greg's DTrace toolkit helps in that respect, but > still it sets the bar pretty high for anybody who would > like to use it. > > It is easy to poke fun at LatencyTOP, but asking the right > question could sometimes be even more important than > being able to deliver the answer. > > Just my 2c. > > Thanks, > Roman. > > P.S. I was able to extend the battery time of my Linux laptop > 1.5x using PowerTOP. Can the same thing be done with DTrace? > Perhaps it can, but I don't think I can code it up. Solaris PowerTOP is almost done. http://www.opensolaris.org/os/project/tesla/Work/Powertop/ <http://www.opensolaris.org/os/project/tesla/Work/Powertop/> -Aubrey Intel OpenSolaris Team -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> _______________________________________________ dtrace-discuss mailing list dtrace-discuss@opensolaris.org
