Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 2/5] trace: [all] Add "guest_vmem" event

[Peter Maydell]

On 17 March 2016 at 19:22, Lluís Vilanova <address@hidden> wrote:
> Mmmmm, the endianness seems more of a vCPU property than one of the memory
> access. A separate event could be added for that (e.g., at vCPU
> initalization/hot-plug and whenever it is dynamically changed like in ARM).

We've chosen to implement it in QEMU as a property of the memory
access. Consider for instance instructions like x86 movbe --
sometimes an individual instruction will be a BE access even if the
CPU more usually does LE accesses. Equally, CPUs might have different
accesses for data and code, or other complicated things.
I think we're probably better off tracing as part of the memory
access the things we've implemented as memory access properties
or flags; at least that's consistent.

> For the sign extension and memory value, what about adding multiple events?
> What I did for instructions is have a simple event and one with extended
> information, so that we can tweak performance of a tracing QEMU by choosing 
> one
> or the other.  We could do the same for memory accesses (e.g., also show the
> memory value, sign extension and physical address).

I think the info that's in the memop value is probably worth
just printing always, it won't make much difference.

Trying to trace physaddrs is very tricky -- in the case of
a TLB hit there is no guarantee you can still identify the
physaddr of what you're accessing (the guest might have
changed the page tables and not invalidated the TLB).

thanks
-- PMM