Introduction to perf event.pptVIP

Introduction to Perf Event Kyle Wang 2011-8-25 Outline Perf tool introduction Related code Arm PMU related Perf tool Perf is a profiler tool for Linux 2.6+ based systems that abstracts away CPU hardware differences in Linux performance measurements and presents a simple commandline interface. Perf is based on the perf_events interface exported by recent versions of the Linux kernel. PerfEvents (Performance analysis tools for Linux) is a new Linux feature that provides a framework for analyzing performance events at both hardware and software levels. Event The perf tool supports a list of measurable events. The tool and underlying kernel interface can measure events coming from different sources. Basically, there are three types of events: Software events : they are pure kernel counters. Examples include: context-switches, minor-fault. PMU hardware events or hardware events : these events come from the processor itself and its Performance Monitoring Unit (PMU). It provides a list of events to measure micro-architectural events such as the number of cycles, instructions retired, L1 cache misses and so on. They vary with each processor type and model. Tracepoint events: they are implemented by the kernel ftrace infrastructure. Those are only available with the 2.6.3x and newer kernels. Options controlling environment selection  The perf tool can be used to count events on a per-thread, per-process, per-cpu or system-wide basis. In per-thread mode, the counter only monitors the execution of a designated thread. When the thread is scheduled out, monitoring stops. When a thread migrated from one processor to another, counters are saved on the current processor and are restored on the new one. The per-process mode is a variant of per-thread where all threads of the process are monitored. Counts and samples are aggregated at the process level. The perf_events interface allows for automatic inheritance on fork() and pthread_create(). By default, the perf tool activate