The tracing_enabled file was used as a quick way to stop
tracers, and try to bring down overhead for things like
the latency tracers (irqsoff, wakeup, etc). But it didn't
work that well.
The tracing_on file was created as a really fast way to
stop recording into the ftrace ring buffer and can interact
with the kernel. That is a tracing_off() call in the kernel
can disable recording of events, and then from userspace one
could echo 1 into the tracing_on file to continue it. The
tracing_enabled function did too much to allow for this.
The tracing_on has taken over as a way to start and stop tracing
and the tracing_enabled file should not be used. But because of
its existance, it still confuses people. Over a year ago the
following commit was added:
commit 6752ab4a9c
Author: Steven Rostedt <srostedt@redhat.com>
Date: Tue Feb 8 13:54:06 2011 -0500
tracing: Deprecate tracing_enabled for tracing_on
This commit added a WARN_ON() if the tracing_enabled file's variable
was changed. After this was added, only LatencyTop complained, and
they soon fixed their tool as there was no reason that LatencyTop
should touch this file as it was using the perf ring buffers which
this file does not interact with. But since that time no one else
has complained about this WARN_ON(). Thus it is safe to assume that
this file is no longer needed. Time to get rid of it.
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Signed-off-by: Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org>
02404baf1b