performance, with the chance of missing traces, then they can choose the preempt disabled version. Running hackbench 3 times with the irqs disabled and 3 times with the preempt disabled function tracer yielded: tracing type times entries recorded ------------ -------- ---------------- irq disabled 43.393 166433066 43.282 166172618 43.298 166256704 preempt disabled 38.969 159871710 38.943 159972935 39.325 161056510 Average: irqs disabled: 43.324 166287462 preempt disabled: 39.079 160300385 preempt is 10.8 percent faster than irqs disabled. I wrote a patch to count function trace recursion and reran hackbench. With irq disabled: 1,150 times the function tracer did not trace due to recursion. with preempt disabled: 5,117,718 times. The thousand times with irq disabled could be due to NMIs, or simply a case where it called a function that was not protected by notrace. But we also see that a large amount of the trace is lost with the preempt version. Signed-off-by: Steven Rostedt Cc: Peter Zijlstra Cc: Andrew Morton Cc: Steven Rostedt Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar