From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Christoph Hellwig Date: Thu, 22 Dec 2005 17:23:03 +0000 Subject: Re: [Perfctr-devel] Re: quick overview of the perfmon2 interface Message-Id: <20051222172303.GC6038@infradead.org> List-Id: References: <20051219113140.GC2690@frankl.hpl.hp.com> <20051220025156.a86b418f.akpm@osdl.org> <20051222115632.GA8773@frankl.hpl.hp.com> <20051222120558.GA31303@infradead.org> <43AAC854.6020608@redhat.com> In-Reply-To: <43AAC854.6020608@redhat.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: William Cohen Cc: Christoph Hellwig , Stephane Eranian , Andrew Morton , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, perfmon@napali.hpl.hp.com, linux-ia64@vger.kernel.org, perfctr-devel@lists.sourceforge.net On Thu, Dec 22, 2005 at 10:37:56AM -0500, William Cohen wrote: > Both OProfile and PAPI are open source and could use such an performance > monitoring interface. > > One of the problems right now is there is a patchwork of performance > monitoring support. Each instrumentation system has its own set of > drivers/patches. Few have support integrated into the kernel, e.g. > OProfile. However, the OProfile driver provides only a subset of the > performance monitoring support, system-wide sampling. The OProfile > driver doesn't allow per-thread monitoring or stopwatch style > measurement, which can be very useful for some performance monitoring > applications. What about improving oprofile then? Unlike the vtune or perfoman people the oprofile authors have shown they actually are able to design sensible interfaces, and oprofile has broad plattform support over most support architectures.