Re: [PATCH 1/1] perf, Add support for Xeon-Phi PMU

[Cyrill Gorcunov <gorcunov@openvz.org>]

On Tue, Sep 25, 2012 at 10:45:02AM -0400, Vince Weaver wrote:
> 
> On Tue, 25 Sep 2012, Cyrill Gorcunov wrote:
> 
> > So guys, if understand all things correctly it's supposed to use some
> > -1/-2 as initial @config value for unsupported events, right? Vince,
> > may not it be easier to use bit 19 as a flag of valid event and clear
> > it when you write to msr, thus we will not have to change "zero is reserved"
> > semantics (otoh i'm not sure if it won't become a problem somewhere in
> > future with some new cpu :)
> 
> Well, we wouldn't want to use a reserved bit.
> In theory we could re-use bit 22 (enable) or bit 20 (APIC enable)
> because those values should in theory be set elsewhere and could probably
> be masked out at an appropriate place.
> 
> Is -2 really a valid cache event on Pentium 4?

Nope, there can't be config with -2 as valid value. So we can use -2
if needed as far as I can tell (the -1 can't be valid as well).

> Though I admit patching all of the various PMU drivers to use -1/-2 rather 
> than 0/-1 will be a pain, especially as many of them just default to 0
> with no initialization currently.

Yup, but if it'll be needed I can tune up p4 code (thought i'll need
some help in testing since i've no p4 cpu anymore).