om the event name it's meant to handle e.g. 'sched::sched_switch()'. The 'format' information for trace events can be used to parse the binary data and map it into a form usable by a given scripting language; see the Perl implemention in subsequent patches for one possible way to leverage the existing trace format parsing code in perf and map that info into specific scripting language types. generate_script() should generate a ready-to-run script for the current set of events in the trace, preferably with bodies that print out every field for each event. Again, look at the Perl implementation for clues as to how that can be done. This is an optional, but very useful op. Support for a given language should also add a language-specific setup function and call it from setup_scripting(). The language-specific setup function associates the the scripting ops for that language with one or more 'language specifiers' (see below) using script_spec_register(). When a script name is specified on the command line, the scripting ops associated with the specified language are used to instantiate and use the appropriate interpreter to process the trace stream. In general, it should be relatively easy to add support for a new language, especially if the language implementation supports an interface allowing an interpreter to be 'embedded' inside another program (in this case the containing program will be 'perf trace'). If so, it should be relatively straightforward to translate trace events into invocations of user-defined script functions where e.g. the function name corresponds to the event type and the function parameters correspond to the event fields. The event and field type information exported by the event tracing infrastructure (via the event 'format' files) should be enough to parse and send any piece of trace data to the user script. The easiest way to see how this can be done would be to look at the Perl implementation contained in perf/util/trace-event-perl.c/.h. There are a couple of other things that aren't covered by the scripting_ops or setup interface and are technically optional, but should be implemented if possible. One of these is support for 'flag' and 'symbolic' fields e.g. being able to use more human-readable values such as 'GFP_KERNEL' or HI/BLOCK_IOPOLL/TASKLET in place of raw flag values. See the Perl implementation to see how this can be done. The other thing is support for 'calling back' into the perf executable to access e.g. uncommon fields not passed by default into handler functions, or any metadata the implementation might want to make available to users via the language interface. Again, see the Perl implementation for examples. Signed-off-by: Tom Zanussi Cc: fweisbec@gmail.com Cc: rostedt@goodmis.org Cc: anton@samba.org Cc: hch@infradead.org LKML-Reference: <1259133352-23685-2-git-send-email-tzanussi@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar ÍC%õ’6x