reason why this sorting is required is to handle the fact that seq files (and any read() operation from user-space) cannot hold the tracepoint mutex across multiple calls, so list entries may vanish between calls. With sorting, the tracepoint iterator becomes usable even if the list don't contain the exact item pointed to by the iterator anymore. Signed-off-by: Mathieu Desnoyers Acked-by: Jason Baron CC: Ingo Molnar CC: Lai Jiangshan CC: Peter Zijlstra CC: Thomas Gleixner CC: Masami Hiramatsu Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20110810191839.GC8525@Krystal Signed-off-by: Steven Rostedt %x