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task: make task span explicit root
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In Tokio, tasks are optionally instrumented with tracing spans to allow
analysis of the runtime behavior to be performed with tools like
tokio-console.

The span that is created for each task gets currently follows the
default tracing behavior and has a contextual parent attached to it
based on the span that is actual when `tokio::spawn` or similar is
called.

However, in tracing, a span will remain "alive" until all its children
spans are closed. This doesn't match how spawned tasks work. A task may
outlive the context in which is was spawned (and frequently does). This
causes tasks which spawn other - longer living - tasks to appear in
`tokio-console` as having lost their waker when instead they should be
shown as completed (tokio-rs/console#345). It can also cause undesired
behavior for unrelated tracing spans if a subscriber is receiving both
the other spans as well as Tokio's instrumentation.

To fix this mismatch in behavior, the task span has `parent: None` set
on it, making it an explicit root - it has no parent. The same was
already done for all spans representing resources in #6107. This change
is made within the scope of #5792.

Due to a defect in the currently available `tracing-mock` crate, it is
not possible to test this change at a tracing level
(tokio-rs/tracing#2440). Instead, a test for the `console-subscriber`
has been written which shows that this change fixes the defect as
observed in `tokio-console` (tokio-rs/console#490).
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hds committed Nov 18, 2023
1 parent 7b55518 commit 571d01c
Showing 1 changed file with 1 addition and 0 deletions.
1 change: 1 addition & 0 deletions tokio/src/util/trace.rs
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -16,6 +16,7 @@ cfg_trace! {
let location = std::panic::Location::caller();
tracing::trace_span!(
target: "tokio::task",
parent: None,
"runtime.spawn",
%kind,
task.name = %name.unwrap_or_default(),
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