Messages in this thread |  | | Date | Sun, 16 Oct 2016 08:53:40 +0200 | From | Ingo Molnar <> | Subject | Re: [PATCH 04/27] perf list: Add support for listing only json events |
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* Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@kernel.org> wrote:
> From: Andi Kleen <ak@linux.intel.com> > > Add an argument to only list json events. To be used for the command > line completion script. This requires adding a new flag to the alias > structure. > > Committer notes: > > Using it: > > $ perf list json
Sigh, this is a pretty poor user interface. :-(
- 'JSON' is an internal data format used by the source code and by vendors to publish event lists. perf might use something else in the future to store the events (for example native .c/.h files) - we don't know. Why should the user care or remember?
- Also, even if the user remembers, it's not clear that using a weird acronym that does not mean much in itself is a good way to key off a high level user interface. Acronyms Seriously Suck.
- The output of 'perf list help' is not really helpful either, so the user who knows that there's "something" to list the vendor hardware events is still stuck. Also, 'perf list hardware' will list the wrong things.
What we do know about the CPU vendor event names is that they are vendor specific, and that's a pretty stable property. So my suggestion would be to simply make it:
perf list vendor
with perhaps add aliases as well:
perf list model perf list cpu-model
... and 'perf list hardware' should probably also list all the vendor specific hardware events as well.
Could we please work a bit more on making vendor specific hardware event handling more usable to people who don't care about internals?
Thanks,
Ingo
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