This post summarizes the progress in the eighth week of the coding period. Work on pcp-mpstat has been started.

mpstat

Hastily copying from the man-pages

The mpstat command writes to standard output activities for each available processor, processor 0 being the first one.

mpstat basically provides cpu utilization information if no option specified. If provided -P option we can specify all/online or which processors usage to show. -I option can be used to report total or percpu interrupt usage. -A options reports everything similar to -P ALL -I ALL.

Reading the source of mpstat, it should be noted that it uses:

1. /proc/stat - For total cpu and interrupt usage
2. /proc/interrupts - For Hard interrupts
3. /proc/softirqs - For Soft interrupts

Creating pcp-mpstat repository

The repository for pcp-mpstat is here. This repo will contain the basic pcp-mpstat code till it gets merged into pcp.
The experience with pcp-pidstat will definitely be useful for writing this one. Hope to make less mistakes.

With new code come new challenges.

Before starting with the basic pcp-mpstat output we realised that the interrupts that are reported by pcp-mpstat are platform dependant and dynamic. So we’d first need to identify what interrupts are available for a machine and then fetch values for those interrupts as pcp metrics.

pmTraversePMNS to the rescue.

Since pcp has an hierarchical naming system for the metrics. Getting child metrics is easy if we know the root/parent metric. And to get that pmTraversePMNS is the function to be called. Just pass the parent metric name to this and it would simply return the list of the child metrics available. So in our case kernel.percpu.interrupts was the parent metric.

Generating basic pcp-mpstat, writing Tests

Once we got the list of metrics to be fetched, further part was easier as we have had experience of pcp-pidstat. I quickly (at the price of many small mistakes which were found out later by Ryan) wrote the basic code which has -P, -I and -A options.
But yeah we are heading in the right direction and we even decided to add pcp-mpstat to next release of pcp on 1st of August.

Meanwhile I bought my first bike. Honda Hornet 160R to be specific. Had a great week.

That’s all folks.