ACK/Cmnt: [N/U][PATCH 0/2] add Real-time Linux Analysis tool (rtla) to linux-tools

[Kevin Becker]

This looks good, but in patch 2, debian/rules.d/2-binary-arch.mk, in
the line where you run make on rtla, you define VERSION="\"6.8.1\""'.
That's fine for now until we pull in 6.8.2+, but in the future, we
should set VERSION to something like ${raw_kernelversion} so we don't
have to update it manually.

Acked-by: Kevin Becker <kevin.becker at canonical.com>

On Wed, Apr 3, 2024 at 1:17 AM Andrea Righi <andrea.righi at canonical.com> wrote:
>
> BugLink: https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/2059080
>
> [Impact]
>
> The **rtla** is a meta-tool that includes a set of commands that aims to
> analyze the real-time properties of Linux.
>
> Considering the latest "low-latency" capabilities acquired by the
> generic kernel and also considering the recent trend in Ubuntu to focus
> on performance and observability (see for example
> https://ubuntu.com/blog/ubuntu-performance-engineering-with-frame-pointers-by-default),
> it makes sense to provide more tools that can help to analyze
> timing/responsive performance, such as rtla.
>
> [Test case]
>
> Simple rtla usage to measure the timer irq / timer thread latency:
>
>  $ sudo rtla timerlat
>
> [Fix]
>
> Enable the build of the rtla binary during the kernel build and ship it
> with linux-tools.
>
> [Regression potential]
>
> The only potential regression is an increased amount of size in the
> linux-tools package, due to the extra binary.
>
> However, the binary itself is really small, the kernel already has all
> the required capabilities enabled and we don't need to introduce any
> additional user-space dependency, therefore such extra space is expected
> to be minimal.