Lockmeter: Highly-Informative Instrumentation for Spin Locks in the Linux Kernel
Ray Bryant, John Hawkes · 2000
Lockmeter is a tool for instrumenting the spin locks in a multiprocessor Linux kernel. Lockmeter was designed to make minimal cache disruptions, taking care to both minimize cache misses and also to minimize interprocessor cache coherency operations. Lockmeter is "highly informative" in the sense that not only does it record overall statistics for each spin lock, it also reports (where possible) these statistics on a per caller basis. This allows one to readily identify which portions of the kernel code are responsible for causing lock contention. In this paper, we describe the capabilities and implementation of Lockmeter version 1.3. Introduction As Linux becomes more popular for use in Web server, E-commerce and other compute intensive application environments, performance requirements on the Linux kernel will be much more stringent than for the "traditional" Linux desktop environment. This is particularly the case when Linux is used as the operating system for a symmetric multipro...