18–20 Sept 2024
Europe/Vienna timezone

Boot time testing with ftrace

20 Sept 2024, 15:30
30m
"Room 1.15 - 1.16" (Austria Center)

"Room 1.15 - 1.16"

Austria Center

106
Internet of Things & Embedded MC Internet of Things & Embedded MC

Speaker

Laura Nao (Collabora)

Description

The Linux kernel currently lacks common upstream terminology for measuring
boot time. Although tools like ftrace are available to trace boot-time
events, there is no standardized approach (and upstream kselftest!) to
measure and identify slowdowns during different stages of the boot process.

In this session, we will explore how to leverage existing tracing tools to
monitor key events in the boot sequence and propose building a kselftest to
automate this process. Building an in-tree test eliminates external
dependencies and standardizes usage across different users and CI systems.
The discussion will cover identifying critical functions to trace,
configuring ftrace (e.g. through bootconfig), parsing trace data, and
comparing it to user-provided reference values to detect significant boot
time regressions.

In this session, we will propose an approach for building such test and
invite community feedback and discussion.

Primary author

Laura Nao (Collabora)

Presentation materials