Well, the direction is that we are unifying ftrace and perf events and we are
actively phasing out individual ftrace plugins as matching events become available
(we already removed a few).
Most new tools use the perf syscall and tool writers have expressed the very
understandable desire that all events (and their reporting facility) be enumerated
and accessible via a unified API/ABI.
While it often seems easier for subsystems to just do their own ad-hoc
logging/reporting in the short run (every subsystem tends to think it has its own
very specific requirements for logging - while users/tool-authors can only shake
their head in disbelief when looking at the myriads of incompatible and inconsistent
facilities). The tooling requirement for unification is strong here and can not be
ignored.
Note that Boris has been working on extending perf events into this area as well,
see this recent submission of patches on lkml:
[PATCH 20/20] ras: Add RAS daemon
One thing is clear: any 'health subsystem' should not do its own flavor of error
reporting - instead we want to unify various forms of event logging into a common
facility.
RAS/EDAC could do its own hardware-specific settings via a separate subsystem -
although even many of those can be expressed via their respective events. (and we
are open on the perf events side to give callbacks/facilities for such use)
The synergies of unified event reporting are very strong.
Thanks,
Ingo
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