Re: [PerfSuite-users] Can perfsuite work with pfmon2?

[Rick K. <rk...@nc...>]

Jie,

For some reason, I believe SourceForge (and/or NCSA) bounced your 
message and marked it as spam, but fortunately I did find a copy in my 
filtered email box.  I just want to mention to you (and all subscribers 
to this list) that we do try to reply to all emails on a relatively 
prompt basis, so if anyone sends a note and does not receive a reply, 
please do not assume we are ignoring you.  We may just not have received 
it... so please feel free to resend.

Thank you for your kind comments on PerfSuite, they are much 
appreciated.  We are always gratified to learn that someone may have 
been assisted in their work by using PerfSuite and welcome comments, 
good or bad.

Regarding PerfSuite working with pfmon2: I assume you mean Perfmon2, the 
performance subsystem kernel work and user library led by Stephane 
Eranian.  Actually, PerfSuite already contains support for Perfmon, but 
only an older version, one running on Itanium platforms under kernel 
version 2.4.x.  That implementation leveraged PerfSuite's design to use 
other performance software beyond PAPI (which has been the workhorse so 
far).  However, it has not been updated for subsequent versions of 
Perfmon, which grew to include many more CPUs than the IA-64 processors.

We had been intending to update the Perfmon support to work directly 
with Perfmon2, but recent developments in the mainline kernel have 
altered the picture substantially.  Some users on this list may be aware 
of the "Performance Counter Library" (PCL), now known as "perf events", 
which has been accepted into the mainline kernel.  There has been much 
discussion of this on the kernel mailing lists, the Perfmon list, and 
the PAPI list.  While all this settles out, we are not actively 
developing towards these other layers, but once things become more 
generally available, we would very much like to provide an alternate 
route to the counters in addition to PAPI (which, in turn, relies on 
perfctr/perfmon/pcl for kernel support).

I hope this answers your question - the situation is pretty fluid at 
this point, but the short answer is: no, at present PerfSuite does not 
work directly with Perfmon2, but we do have plans to expand beyond PAPI.

Rick


> Hi Rick,
>
> I have been working with perfsuite for some time.
> It helps me a lot in my work and thanks for your excellent work.
>
> Perfsuite depends on perfctr to access CPU performance counters.
> However, there are some disadvantages with perfctr implementation,
> compared with pfmon2, which is also widely used and supported in
> performance tools.
>
> So, I'd like to know if the latest perfsuite can work with pfmon2
> package. If not, do you have any plan to do it?
>
> Regards,
> Jie 
>
>
>