From: "Yan, Zheng" <zheng.z....@intel.com> Haswell has a new feature that utilizes the existing Last Branch Record facility to record call chains. When the feature is enabled, function call will be collected as normal, but as return instructions are executed the last captured branch record is popped from the on-chip LBR registers. The LBR call stack facility can help perf to get call chains of progam without frame pointer. When perf tool requests PERF_SAMPLE_CALLCHAIN + PERF_SAMPLE_BRANCH_USER, this feature is dynamically enabled by default. This feature can be disabled/enabled through an attribute file in the cpu pmu sysfs directory.
The LBR call stack has following known limitations 1. Zero length calls are not filtered out by hardware 2. Exception handing such as setjmp/longjmp will have calls/returns not match 3. Pushing different return address onto the stack will have calls/returns not match The patch series depends on Andi's "Basic perf PMU support for Haswell v1" Available from https://github.com/ukernel/linux.git hws/pmu4 Regards Yan, Zheng -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/