Re: [PerfSuite-users] Problem with psconfig, workaround for building a config file?

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

Tyler - well, it seems that you've already made progress which is
great news.  Thanks again for the patience.  I just have a couple
of comments that might help clarify a thing or two:

On Mon, 18 Apr 2005 ol...@ec... wrote:

> In fact, tDOM was 
> installed correctly the entire time but I had set the --with-tdom=TDOM_PATH 
> option in ./configure incorrectly which was causing PerfSuite to not find the 
> files it needed.

I see.  This happens pretty frequently, usually it's the trailing "/lib"
portion of the path that people leave out when configuring PerfSuite.
This might be something that should be changed within the configure
itself if it continues to trip people up.  I'm glad to hear you got
it working.

> 
> psrun does work fine with profil.xml, but it doesn't report anything useful. 
> The only thing it tells us is the processor, it's cache configuration, etc. 
> and nothing about instruction counts, cache miss rates, or other profiling 
> information.

Without kernel support for accessing the performance counters, it's
not possible to get things like cache miss counts, etc.  On x86/Linux,
the kernel support comes from the perfctr patch, which is in turn
used by PAPI as you know.  So I would never expect an unpatched
x86 kernel to provide any of the counter stuff.  In that case, about the
best we can do is time-based, gprof-style, profiling, which is what
psrun should produce in your case when using the profil.xml configuration
file.  The executable has to run long enough for an interrupt/sample
to occur, though... a few seconds of CPU time should be plenty.
The output XML document should contain addresses and sample counts,
which can be post-processed with psprocess.

> Anyway with tDOM installed correctly I enthusiasticly went to run 
> psconfig to create our own configuration, when it spit out an error message:
> 
> > ERROR: Unable to find PAPI
> 
> Which I thought was completely optional. But I installed PAPI on my machine 
> anyway (without patching the kernel, because I don't have the priveledges to 
> do so) and re-configured and installed PerfSuite with the --with-papi=PAPI_DIR 
> option, but it still did not work.

psconfig is the "least important" of the pieces, and so is not regularly
updated.  I think it's still a nice and useful little tool, and probably
down the road will be updated so that it'll do something if hardware
counter support is not present but unfortunately what you report is
what you can expect from 0.6.1 (and 0.6.2).  Bad documentation on
this side, I'm afraid :(

> 
> Anyway for the time being this project is being due to being a busy grad-
> student, but I'll probably pick it back up sometime this summer when I have 
> more free-time. In regards for making distrobution specific packages (RPMs, 
> DEB, etc) I'd love to see that happen. I know on SourceForge you can place 
> help wanted ads (look in the Admin section and it should be there somewher) 
> and see if there are any OSS developers who can help you package it. (I'm 
> assuming you don't have the time to do it yourself). I'd like to help, but I'm 
> far too busy right now and I've never created packages for any of the programs 
> I've written, although I'll need to learn how to soon for another OSS project 
> I've been working on for over 9 months. :)
> 
> Thanks once again for all your help.

Sounds good - any and all help is welcome and appreciated, and your
feedback qualifies as help already (hopefully your pain is someone else's 
gain!). I think you probably will see at a minimum an RPM-based release
in addition to the usual .tar.gz format later on, probably for 0.6.2
final.  Most likely, there will be a tDOM RPM and a PerfSuite one,
and ideally you would install them in that order.  I'd guess that
there will be with- and without-PAPI versions, since PAPI is optional
and has that kernel path dependency currently on x86 systems.

Thanks again - Rick