e nicely serialized while we should actually more trust the timestamps. If we reorder by timestamps we get: (1) Xorg-4276 [001] 1494.663860125: sched_wakeup: task xfce4-panel:4569 [120] success=1 [000] (2) [init]-0 [000] 1494.663899990: sched_switch: task swapper:0 [140] (R) ==> xfce4-panel:4569 [120] (3) xfce4-panel-4569 [000] 1494.663928373: sched_switch: task xfce4-panel:4569 [120] (S) ==> swapper:0 [140] (4) Xorg-4276 [001] 1504.098252756: sched_wakeup: task xfce4-panel:4569 [120] success=1 [000] (5) perf-5219 [000] 1504.100353302: sched_switch: task perf:5219 [120] (S) ==> xfce4-panel:4569 [120] Now the trace make more sense, xfce4-panel is sleeping. Then it is woken up in (1), scheduled in (2) It goes to sleep in (3), woken up in (4) and scheduled in (5). Now, latency captured between (1) and (2) is of 39 us. And between (4) and (5) it is 2.1 ms. Such pattern of bad serializing is the origin of the high latencies reported by perf sched. Basically, we need to check whether wake up time is higher than schedule out time. If it's not the case, we need to tag the current work atom as invalid. Beside that, we may need to work later on a better ordering of the traces given by the kernel. After this patch: xfce4-session | 0.221 ms | 1 | avg: 0.538 ms | max: 0.538 ms | Signed-off-by: Frederic Weisbecker Cc: Mike Galbraith Cc: Peter Zijlstra Cc: Paul Mackerras Cc: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar ®*ûxê@™ixœ­“Ïn