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+# Proposal: Support for pprof profiler labels
+
+Author: Michael Matloob
+
+Last updated: 11 October 2016
+
+Discussion at https://golang.org/issue/17280.
+
+## Abstract
+
+This document proposes support for adding labels to pprof profiler records.
+Labels are a key-value map that is used to distinguish calls of the same
+function in different contexts when looking at profiles.
+
+## Background
+
+[Proposal #16093](golang.org/issue/16093) proposes to generate profiles in the
+gzipped profile proto format that's now the standard format pprof expects
+profiles to be in.
+This format supports adding labels to profile records, but currently the Go
+profiler does not produce those labels.
+We propose adding a mechanism for setting profiler labels in Go.
+
+These profiler labels are attached to profile samples, which correspond to a
+snapshot of a goroutine's stack.
+Because of this, we need the labels to be associated with a goroutine so that
+they can be accessible at profile sampling time, which may occur during memory
+allocation, lock acquisition, or in the handler for SIGPROF, an asynchronous
+signal.
+
+## Motivation
+
+Profiles contain a limited amount of context for each sample: essentially the
+call stack at the time each sample was taken.
+But a user profiling their code may need additional context when debugging a
+problem: Was there a particular user or RPC or other context-dependent data that
+accounted for the code being executed?
+This change allows users to annotate profiles with that information for more
+fine-grained profiling.
+
+It is natural to use `context.Context` types to store this information, because
+their purpose is to hold context-dependent data.
+So we've added the `context.DoWithLabels` function which is the intended
+mechanism for users to set and unset profiler labels.
+
+Supporting profiler labels necessarily changes the runtime package, because
+that's where profiling is implemented.
+The runtime package will expose the low-level `SetProfilerLabels` function
+primarily for internal use by the context package.
+Like the other low-level profiling functions in the runtime, ordinary programs
+are not expected to call this API directly, but to use the high-level
+`context.DoWithLabels` API.
+
+One goal of the design is to avoid creating a mechanism that could be used to
+implement goroutine-local storage.
+That's why it's possible to set profile labels but not retrieve them.
+
+
+## Proposed API
+
+In this proposal, the following function will be added to the
+[context](golang.org/pkg/context) package.
+
+    package context
+
+    // DoWithLabels calls f with a copy of the parent context with the
+    // given labels added to the parent's label map.
+    // Labels should be a slice of key-value pairs.
+    // Labels are added to the label map in the order provided and override
+    // any previous label with the same key.
+    // The combined label map will be set for the duration of the call to f
+    // and restored once f returns.
+    func DoWithLabels(parent Context, labels [][2]string, f func(ctx Context))
+
+The following types and functions will be added to the
+[runtime](golang.org/pkg/runtime) package.
+They exist to support the implementation of `context.DoWithLabels`.
+As such, they are low level functions that should almost never be used outside
+the standard library.
+
+    package runtime
+
+    // ProfileLabels is an immutable map of profiler labels. A nil
+    // *ProfileLabels is an empty map of labels.
+    // There is intentionally no way to access the profile labels contained
+    // inside the ProfLabels because doing so could create a goroutine-local
+    // storage mechanism.
+    type ProfileLabels struct { /* runtime-internal unexported fields */ }
+
+    // SetProfileLabels associates the specified profile
+    // labels with the current goroutine.
+    // SetProfileLabels returns the ProfileLabels currently set on
+    // the current goroutine.
+    func SetProfileLabels(labels *ProfileLabels) *ProfileLabels
+
+    // WithLabels returns a new ProfileLabels with the given labels added.
+    // A label overwrites a prior label with the same key.
+    func (l *ProfileLabels) WithLabels(labels ...[2]string) *ProfileLabels
+
+### `Context` changes
+
+Each `Context` has a set of profiler labels associated with it.
+`DoWithLabels` calls `f` with a new context whose labels map is
+the the parent context's labels map with the additional label arguments added.
+Consider the tree of function calls during an execution of the program,
+treating concurrent and deferred calls like any other.  The labels of a
+function are those installed by the first call to DoWithLabels found by
+walking up from that function toward the root of the tree.  Each profiler
+sample records the labels of the currently executing function.
+
+### Runtime changes
+
+The profiler will annotate all profile samples of each goroutine by the set of
+labels associated with that goroutine.
+
+The associated set of labels will also be replaced if the user calls `SetProfileLabels` with another
+`ProfileLabels` value.
+
+New goroutines inherit the ProfileLabels value set on their creator.
+
+## Compatibility
+
+There are no compatibility issues with this change. The compressed binary format
+emitted by the profiler already records labels (see
+[proposal 16093](golang.org/issue/16093)), but the profiler does not populate
+them.
+
+## Implementation
+
+Because `context` and `runtime` have compatible notions of profile labels,
+`context.Context` can simply store a `*runtime.ProfileLabels`. Internally,
+`context.Context` can extend its label set directly using `runtime.WithLabels`,
+which means there's no performance penalty to using the higher-level context
+API.
+
+Initially, `runtime.ProfileLabels` may be implemented as a simple
+`map[string]string` that is copied when new labels are added. However, the
+specification permits more sophisticated implementations that scale to large
+numbers of label changes such as persistent set structures or diff arrays. This
+would allow a set of _n_ labels to be built up in at most
+O(_n_ log _n_) time.
+
+This change requires the profile signal handler to interact with pointers, which
+means it has to interact with the garbage collector.
+There are two complications to this:
+
+1. This requires the profile signal handler to save a `*ProfileLabels` in the
+CPU profile structure, which is allocated off-heap.
+Addressing this will require either adding the CPU profile structure as a new GC
+root, or allocating the CPU profile structure in the garbage-collected heap.
+
+2. Normally, writing the `*ProfileLabels` to the CPU profile structure would
+require a write barrier, but write barriers are disallowed in a signal handler.
+This can be addressed by treating the CPU profile structure similar to stacks,
+which also do not have write barriers.
+This could mean a STW re-scan of the CPU profile structure, or shading the old
+`*ProfileLabels` when `SetProfileLabels` replaces it.
+