perf callchain: Feed callchains into a cursor

The callchains are fed with an array of a fixed size.
As a result we iterate over each callchains three times:

- 1st to resolve symbols
- 2nd to filter out context boundaries
- 3rd for the insertion into the tree

This also involves some pairs of memory allocation/deallocation
everytime we insert a callchain, for the filtered out array of
addresses and for the array of symbols that comes along.

Instead, feed the callchains through a linked list with persistent
allocations. It brings several pros like:

- Merge the 1st and 2nd iterations in one. That was possible before
but in a way that would involve allocating an array slightly taller
than necessary because we don't know in advance the number of context
boundaries to filter out.

- Much lesser allocations/deallocations. The linked list keeps
persistent empty entries for the next usages and is extendable at
will.

- Makes it easier for multiple sources of callchains to feed a
stacktrace together. This is deemed to pave the way for cfi based
callchains wherein traditional frame pointer based kernel
stacktraces will precede cfi based user ones, producing an overall
callchain which size is hardly predictable. This requirement
makes the static array obsolete and makes a linked list based
iterator a much more flexible fit.

Basic testing on a big perf file containing callchains (~ 176 MB)
has shown a throughput gain of about 11% with perf report.

Cc: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Cc: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
LKML-Reference: <1294977121-5700-2-git-send-email-fweisbec@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Frederic Weisbecker <fweisbec@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>

1 files changed, 2 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/tools/perf/util/hist.h b/tools/perf/util/hist.h
index ee78985..889559b 100644
--- a/tools/perf/util/hist.h
+++ b/tools/perf/util/hist.h
@@ -77,6 +77,8 @@ struct hists {
 	u64			event_stream;
 	u32			type;
 	u16			col_len[HISTC_NR_COLS];
+	/* Best would be to reuse the session callchain cursor */
+	struct callchain_cursor	callchain_cursor;
 };
 
 struct hist_entry *__hists__add_entry(struct hists *self,