Re: [perfmon2] IV.3 - AMD IBS

[Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>]

* stephane eranian <eranian@googlemail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Jun 23, 2009 at 4:05 PM, Ingo Molnar<mingo@elte.hu> wrote:
> >
> > * stephane eranian <eranian@googlemail.com> wrote:
> >
> >> > The most natural way to support IBS would be to have a special
> >> > sampling cycle counter and use that as group lead and add non
> >> > sampling siblings to that group to get individual elements.
> >> >
> >> As discussed in my message, I think the way to support IBS is to
> >> create two pseudo-events (like your perf_hw_event_ids), one for
> >> fetch and one for op (because they could be measured
> >> simultaneously). The sample_period field would be used to express
> >> the IBS*CTL maxcnt, subject to the verification that the bottom 4
> >> bits must be 0. And then, you add two new sampling formats
> >> PERF_SAMPLE_IBSFETCH, PERF_SAMPLE_IBSOP. Those would only work
> >> with IBS pseudo events. Once you have the randomize option in
> >> perf_counter_attr, you could even enable IBSFETCH randomization.
> >
> > I'd suggest to start smaller, and first express the 'precise' 
> > nature of IBS transparently, by simply mapping it to one of the 
> > generic events. (cycles and instructions both appears to be 
> > possible)
>
> IBS is precise by nature.

(yes. Did you understand my comments above as saying the opposite?)

> [...] It does not work like PEBS. It tags an instruction and then 
> collects info about it. When it retires, IBS freezes and triggers 
> an interrupt like a regular counter interrupt. Except this time, 
> you don't care about the interrupted IP, you use the instruction 
> address in the IBS data register, it is guaranteed to correspond 
> to the tagged instruction.
> 
> The sampling period expresses the delay before picking the 
> instruction to tag. And as I said before, it is only 20 bits and 
> the bottom 4 bits must be zero (as they cannot be encoded).

The 20 bits delay is in cycles, right? So this in itself still lends 
itself to be transparently provided as a PERF_COUNT_HW_CPU_CYCLES 
counter.

	Ingo