[perfmon2] 2.6.30 update

[stephane e. <er...@go...>]

Hi,

Many people have asked me for a release date for the 2.6.30 patch.
I made some progress over the week-end to address some of the
remaining issues, especially regarding PEBS support on Nehalem.
I have created a generic PEBS sampling format now. I am testing
it and it is looking promising.

But I discovered there was a major issue on i386 (32-bit) where the
kernel systematically panics at the first PMU interrupt. It is not clear
to me what is causing this. If you have a 32-bit system, I would
appreciate if you could pull from the GIT tree, compile and run the
libpfm program examples_v2.x/notify_self. It crashes the system
on first PMU interrupt for me on Atom and Core 2. This did not happen
with 2.6.29.

I have also updated libpfm and pfmon to flush out all the patches
I had  pending. If you pull from CVS for both packages, you will get
full AMD IBS support for pfmon and a much improved symbolization
support. Those two features should work fine with 2.6.29 as well.

To use IBS for cache miss sampling, you can do:

    pfmon --resolv --smpl-module=ibs -e IBSOP_EVENT:cycles
--long-smpl-period=0xffff0 \
    --ibs-dcmiss-code foo

If you want to process the rich IBS data yourself, you can use the
--smpl-compact
option and then you have to decode the IBS registers.

Thanks.