[Perfctr-devel] Perctr for newest kernels?

[Martin C. <cra...@co...>]

What are the expectations to port perfctr to newest Linux kernels?

Bugs in 2.6.29/30 and early 2.6.31s force me to go directly to
2.6.31.3.  I have an application that does extensive self-monitoring
via PAPI and so far I used perfctr because perfmon was just too slow
at quickly reading counters, which I do very frequently.  I need
something that is about the speed of gettimeofday(2).

According to a question I posted on the PAPI forum they sit on top
Linux' new perf_counters only with an experimental implementation, and
they only interfaces PAPI to the slower methods of getting counters in
perf_counters (whatever that might be).  I have not benchmarked how
slow exactly that would be but I'm not optimistic.

In a word, I have a real need for perfctr on 2.6.31.3.

Otherwise I would have to make a decision to maybe abandon PAPI and
sit directly on top of perf_counters, which I would hate doing, or sit
around doing nothing until the situation with PAPI on top of
perf_counters gets sorted, which isn't my style.  And who knows what
kind of (non-)pressure there is to support the faster calls.

Looking for general comments.  What do you perfcrt users do now that
some dices have been thrown?

Martin
-- 
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Martin Cracauer <cra...@co...>   http://www.cons.org/cracauer/
FreeBSD - where you want to go, today.      http://www.freebsd.org/