perf record: Respect --no-switch-events

Context switch events are added automatically by Intel PT and Coresight.

Make it possible to suppress them. That is useful for tracing the
scheduler without the disturbance that the switch event processing
creates.

Example:

  Prerequisites:

    $ which perf
    ~/bin/perf
    $ sudo setcap "cap_sys_rawio,cap_sys_admin,cap_sys_ptrace,cap_syslog,cap_ipc_lock=ep" ~/bin/perf
    $ sudo chmod +r /proc/kcore

  Before:

    $ perf record --no-switch-events --kcore -a -e intel_pt//k -- sleep 0.001
    [ perf record: Woken up 1 times to write data ]
    [ perf record: Captured and wrote 0.938 MB perf.data ]
    $ perf script -D | grep PERF_RECORD_SWITCH | wc -l
    572

  After:

    $ perf record --no-switch-events --kcore -a -e intel_pt//k -- sleep 0.001
    Warning:
    Intel Processor Trace decoding will not be possible except for kernel tracing!
    [ perf record: Woken up 1 times to write data ]
    [ perf record: Captured and wrote 0.838 MB perf.data ]
    $ perf script -D | grep PERF_RECORD_SWITCH | wc -l
    0

    $ sudo chmod go-r /proc/kcore
    $ sudo setcap -r ~/bin/perf

Signed-off-by: Adrian Hunter <adrian.hunter@intel.com>
Tested-by: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
Cc: Andi Kleen <ak@linux.intel.com>
Cc: Jiri Olsa <jolsa@redhat.com>
Cc: Mathieu Poirier <mathieu.poirier@linaro.org>
Link: http://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20200528120859.21604-1-adrian.hunter@intel.com
Signed-off-by: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>

1 files changed, 3 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/tools/perf/Documentation/perf-record.txt b/tools/perf/Documentation/perf-record.txt
index 561ef55743e2..97b1a866ab22 100644
--- a/tools/perf/Documentation/perf-record.txt
+++ b/tools/perf/Documentation/perf-record.txt
@@ -458,7 +458,9 @@ This option sets the time out limit. The default value is 500 ms.
 
 --switch-events::
 Record context switch events i.e. events of type PERF_RECORD_SWITCH or
-PERF_RECORD_SWITCH_CPU_WIDE.
+PERF_RECORD_SWITCH_CPU_WIDE. In some cases (e.g. Intel PT or CoreSight)
+switch events will be enabled automatically, which can be suppressed by
+by the option --no-switch-events.
 
 --clang-path=PATH::
 Path to clang binary to use for compiling BPF scriptlets.