Bye-bye Performance Counters, welcome Performance Events!
In the past few months the perfcounters subsystem has grown out its
initial role of counting hardware events, and has become (and is
becoming) a much broader generic event enumeration, reporting, logging,
monitoring, analysis facility.
Naming its core object 'perf_counter' and naming the subsystem
'perfcounters' has become more and more of a misnomer. With pending
code like hw-breakpoints support the 'counter' name is less and
less appropriate.
All in one, we've decided to rename the subsystem to 'performance
events' and to propagate this rename through all fields, variables
and API names. (in an ABI compatible fashion)
The word 'event' is also a bit shorter than 'counter' - which makes
it slightly more convenient to write/handle as well.
Thanks goes to Stephane Eranian who first observed this misnomer and
suggested a rename.
User-space tooling and ABI compatibility is not affected - this patch
should be function-invariant. (Also, defconfigs were not touched to
keep the size down.)
This patch has been generated via the following script:
FILES=$(find * -type f | grep -vE 'oprofile|[^K]config')
sed -i \
-e 's/PERF_EVENT_/PERF_RECORD_/g' \
-e 's/PERF_COUNTER/PERF_EVENT/g' \
-e 's/perf_counter/perf_event/g' \
-e 's/nb_counters/nb_events/g' \
-e 's/swcounter/swevent/g' \
-e 's/tpcounter_event/tp_event/g' \
$FILES
for N in $(find . -name perf_counter.[ch]); do
M=$(echo $N | sed 's/perf_counter/perf_event/g')
mv $N $M
done
FILES=$(find . -name perf_event.*)
sed -i \
-e 's/COUNTER_MASK/REG_MASK/g' \
-e 's/COUNTER/EVENT/g' \
-e 's/\<event\>/event_id/g' \
-e 's/counter/event/g' \
-e 's/Counter/Event/g' \
$FILES
... to keep it as correct as possible. This script can also be
used by anyone who has pending perfcounters patches - it converts
a Linux kernel tree over to the new naming. We tried to time this
change to the point in time where the amount of pending patches
is the smallest: the end of the merge window.
Namespace clashes were fixed up in a preparatory patch - and some
stylistic fallout will be fixed up in a subsequent patch.
( NOTE: 'counters' are still the proper terminology when we deal
with hardware registers - and these sed scripts are a bit
over-eager in renaming them. I've undone some of that, but
in case there's something left where 'counter' would be
better than 'event' we can undo that on an individual basis
instead of touching an otherwise nicely automated patch. )
Suggested-by: Stephane Eranian <eranian@google.com>
Acked-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Acked-by: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Reviewed-by: Arjan van de Ven <arjan@linux.intel.com>
Cc: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>
Cc: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
Cc: Frederic Weisbecker <fweisbec@gmail.com>
Cc: Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org>
Cc: Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org>
Cc: David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com>
Cc: Kyle McMartin <kyle@mcmartin.ca>
Cc: Martin Schwidefsky <schwidefsky@de.ibm.com>
Cc: "David S. Miller" <davem@davemloft.net>
Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Cc: "H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@zytor.com>
Cc: <linux-arch@vger.kernel.org>
LKML-Reference: <new-submission>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Remove some, now useless, global storage.
Don't calculate the stddev when not needed.
Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
LKML-Reference: <new-submission>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Use the more advanced single pass variance algorithm outlined
on the wikipedia page. This is numerically more stable for
larger sample sets.
Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
LKML-Reference: <new-submission>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
When we're computing the mean by sampling the distribution,
then the std dev of the mean is related to the std dev of the
sample set by:
stddev_mean = std_dev / sqrt(N)
Which is exactly what we want.
This results in the error on the mean decreasing with
increasing number of samples.
Also fix the scaled == -1, aka not counted case.
Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
LKML-Reference: <new-submission>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Since we don't need all the individual samples to calculate the
error remove both the limit and the storage overhead associated
with that.
Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
LKML-Reference: <new-submission>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
The current noise computation does:
\Sum abs(n_i - avg(n)) * N^-1.5
Which is (afaik) not a regular noise function, and needs the
complete sample set available to post-process.
Change this to use a regular stddev computation which can be
done by keeping a two sums:
stddev = sqrt( 1/N (\Sum n_i^2) - avg(n)^2 )
For which we only need to keep \Sum n_i and \Sum n_i^2.
Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: <stable@kernel.org>
LKML-Reference: <new-submission>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Librarize trace_event() helper so that perf trace can use it
too. Also clean up the debug.h includes a bit.
It's not good to have it included in perf.h because it doesn't
make it flexible against other headers it may need (headers
that can also depend on perf.h and then create a recursive
header dependency).
Signed-off-by: Frederic Weisbecker <fweisbec@gmail.com>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
Cc: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>
LKML-Reference: <1250453149-664-1-git-send-email-fweisbec@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Factorize multiple definitions of high level dso helpers into the
symbol source file.
The side effect is a general export of the verbose and eprintf
debugging helpers into a new file dedicated to debugging purposes.
Signed-off-by: Frederic Weisbecker <fweisbec@gmail.com>
Cc: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>
Cc: Brice Goglin <Brice.Goglin@inria.fr>
We want to use a coherent flag for -S/--stat across all tools,
so free up -S in perf stat.
Signed-off-by: Brice Goglin <Brice.Goglin@inria.fr>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: paulus@samba.org
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
perf stat and perf record currently look for all options on the command
line. This can lead to some confusion:
# perf stat ls -l
Error: unknown switch `l'
While we can work around this by adding '--' before the command, the git
option parsing code can stop at the first non option:
# perf stat ls -l
Performance counter stats for 'ls -l':
....
Signed-off-by: Anton Blanchard <anton@samba.org>
Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
LKML-Reference: <20090722130412.GD9029@kryten>
Building builtin-stat.c reports the following errors:
cc1: warnings being treated as errors
builtin-stat.c: In function ‘run_perf_stat’:
builtin-stat.c:242: erreur: ignoring return value of ‘read’, declared with attribute warn_unused_result
builtin-stat.c:255: erreur: ignoring return value of ‘read’, declared with attribute warn_unused_result
make: *** [builtin-stat.o] Erreur 1
This patch handles the possible pipe read failures.
Signed-off-by: Frederic Weisbecker <fweisbec@gmail.com>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>
Cc: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Cc: Anton Blanchard <anton@samba.org>
Cc: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
LKML-Reference: <1246474930-6088-2-git-send-email-fweisbec@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
MATCH_EVENT is useful:
1. for multiple attrs checking
2. avoid repetition of PERF_TYPE_ and PERF_COUNT_ and save space
3. avoids line breakage
Signed-off-by: Jaswinder Singh Rajput <jaswinderrajput@gmail.com>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
LKML-Reference: <1246440909.3403.5.camel@hpdv5.satnam>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Enable -Wextra. This found a few real bugs plus a number
of signed/unsigned type mismatches/uncleanlinesses. It
also required a few annotations
All things considered it was still worth it so lets try with
this enabled for now.
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>
Cc: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Cc: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
Cc: Frederic Weisbecker <fweisbec@gmail.com>
LKML-Reference: <new-submission>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
This provides a way to mark a counter to be enabled on the next
exec. This is useful for measuring the total activity of a
program without including overhead from the process that
launches it.
This also changes the perf stat command to use this new
facility.
Signed-off-by: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
LKML-Reference: <19017.43927.838745.689203@cargo.ozlabs.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Vince Weaver reported a 'perf stat' measurement overhead in the
count of retired instructions, which can amount to a +6000
instructions inflated count in the reported count.
At present, perf stat creates its counters on the perf process. Thus
the counters count the fork and various other activity in both the
parent and child, such as the resolver overhead for resolving PLT
entries for any libc functions that haven't been called before, such
as execvp.
This reduces the overhead by creating the counters on the child process
after the fork, using a couple of pipes to synchronize so that the
child process waits until the parent has created the counters before
doing the exec. To eliminate the PLT resolution overhead on calling
execvp, this does a dummy execvp first which will always fail.
With this, the overhead of executing a program goes down from over
4800 instructions to about 90 instructions on powerpc (32-bit).
This was measured with a statically-linked program written in
assembler which only does the 3 instructions needed to call _exit(0).
Before:
$ perf stat -e 0:1:u ./three
Performance counter stats for './three':
4858 instructions
0.001274523 seconds time elapsed
After:
$ perf stat -e 0:1:u ./three
Performance counter stats for './three':
92 instructions
0.000468153 seconds time elapsed
Reported-by: Vince Weaver <vince@deater.net>
Signed-off-by: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
LKML-Reference: <19016.41425.814043.870352@cargo.ozlabs.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Peter expressed a strong preference for percentage based
display of scaled values - so revert to that from the
recently introduced multiplication-factor unit.
Reported-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Jaswinder Singh Rajput <jaswinder@kernel.org>
Cc: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>
Cc: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Cc: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
LKML-Reference: <new-submission>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Set attrs and nr_counters if no event is selected and !null_run.
Setting of attrs should depend on number of counters,
so we need to memcpy only for sizeof(default_attrs)
Also set nr_counters as ARRAY_SIZE(default_attrs) in place of
hardcoded value.
Signed-off-by: Jaswinder Singh Rajput <jaswinderrajput@gmail.com>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
LKML-Reference: <1246126749.32198.16.camel@hpdv5.satnam>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
In multi-run (-r/--repeat) printouts, print out the noise of
the wall-clock average as well.
Also, fix a bug in printing out scaled counters: if it was not
scaled then we should not update the average with -1.
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>
Cc: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Cc: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
LKML-Reference: <new-submission>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Allow a no-counters run. This can be useful to measure just
elapsed wall-clock time - or to assess the raw overhead of perf
stat itself, without running any counters.
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>
Cc: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Cc: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
LKML-Reference: <new-submission>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Remove dead code and do some code alignment.
Signed-off-by: Jaswinder Singh Rajput <jaswinderrajput@gmail.com>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
LKML-Reference: <1245847774.2681.2.camel@ht.satnam>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Error message should use stderr for verbose (-v), otherwise
message will be lost for:
$ ./perf stat -v <cmd> > /dev/null
For example on AMD bus-cycles event is not available so now
it looks like:
$ ./perf stat -v -e bus-cycles ls > /dev/null
Error: counter 0, sys_perf_counter_open() syscall returned with -1 (Invalid argument)
Performance counter stats for 'ls':
<not counted> bus-cycles
0.006765877 seconds time elapsed.
Signed-off-by: Jaswinder Singh Rajput <jaswinderrajput@gmail.com>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
LKML-Reference: <1245757369.3776.1.camel@localhost.localdomain>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
On 64-bit powerpc, __u64 is defined to be unsigned long rather than
unsigned long long. This causes compiler warnings every time we
print a __u64 value with %Lx.
Rather than changing __u64, we define our own u64 to be unsigned long
long on all architectures, and similarly s64 as signed long long.
For consistency we also define u32, s32, u16, s16, u8 and s8. These
definitions are put in a new header, types.h, because these definitions
are needed in util/string.h and util/symbol.h.
The main change here is the mechanical change of __[us]{64,32,16,8}
to remove the "__". The other changes are:
* Create types.h
* Include types.h in perf.h, util/string.h and util/symbol.h
* Add types.h to the LIB_H definition in Makefile
* Added (u64) casts in process_overflow_event() and print_sym_table()
to kill two remaining warnings.
Signed-off-by: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Acked-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: benh@kernel.crashing.org
LKML-Reference: <19003.33494.495844.956580@cargo.ozlabs.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Add the --repeat <n> feature to perf stat, which repeats a given
command up to a 100 times, collects the stats and calculates an
average and a stddev.
For example, the following oneliner 'perf stat' command runs hackbench
5 times and prints a tabulated result of all metrics, with averages
and noise levels (in percentage) printed:
aldebaran:~/linux/linux/tools/perf> ./perf stat --repeat 5 ~/hackbench 10
Time: 0.117
Time: 0.108
Time: 0.089
Time: 0.088
Time: 0.100
Performance counter stats for '/home/mingo/hackbench 10' (5 runs):
1243.989586 task-clock-msecs # 10.460 CPUs ( +- 4.720% )
47706 context-switches # 0.038 M/sec ( +- 19.706% )
387 CPU-migrations # 0.000 M/sec ( +- 3.608% )
17793 page-faults # 0.014 M/sec ( +- 0.354% )
3770941606 cycles # 3031.329 M/sec ( +- 4.621% )
1566372416 instructions # 0.415 IPC ( +- 2.703% )
16783421 cache-references # 13.492 M/sec ( +- 5.202% )
7128590 cache-misses # 5.730 M/sec ( +- 7.420% )
0.118924455 seconds time elapsed.
The goal of this feature is to allow the reliance on these accurate
statistics and to know how many times a command has to be repeated
for the noise to go down to an acceptable level.
(The -v option can be used to see a line printed out as each run progresses.)
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>
Cc: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Cc: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
LKML-Reference: <new-submission>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
- use IPC for the instruction normalization output
- CPUs for the CPU utilization factor value.
- print out time elapsed like the other rows
- tidy up the task-clocks/cpu-clocks printout
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>
Cc: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Cc: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
LKML-Reference: <new-submission>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Pure renames only, to PERF_COUNT_HW_* and PERF_COUNT_SW_*.
Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>
Cc: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Cc: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
LKML-Reference: <new-submission>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Currently report and stat catch SIGINT (and others) without altering
their exit state. This means that things like:
while :; do perf stat ./foo ; done
Loops become hard-to-interrupt, because bash never sees perf terminate
due to interruption. Fix this.
Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>
Cc: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Cc: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
LKML-Reference: <new-submission>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Before:
$ perf stat ~/hackbench 5
error: syscall returned with -1 (No such device)
After:
$ perf stat ~/hackbench 5
Time: 1.640
Performance counter stats for '/home/mingo/hackbench 5':
6524.570382 task-clock-ticks # 3.838 CPU utilization factor
35704 context-switches # 0.005 M/sec
191 CPU-migrations # 0.000 M/sec
8958 page-faults # 0.001 M/sec
<not counted> cycles
<not counted> instructions
<not counted> cache-references
<not counted> cache-misses
Wall-clock time elapsed: 1699.999995 msecs
Also add -v (--verbose) option to allow the printing of failed
counter opens.
Plus dont print 'inf' if wall-time is zero (due to jiffies granularity),
instead skip the printing of the CPU utilization factor.
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>
Cc: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Cc: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
LKML-Reference: <new-submission>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Several people have suggested that 'perf' has become a full-fledged
tool that should be moved out of Documentation/. Move it to the
(new) tools/ directory.
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>
Cc: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Cc: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
LKML-Reference: <new-submission>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
