Re: [RFC][PATCH 00/11] perf pmu interface -v2

Peter Zijlstra
2010-07-01T15:40:06Z

On Thu, 2010-07-01 at 16:31 +0100, MattFleming wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 01, 2010 at 05:02:35PM +0200, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> >
> > Matt, you said it broke SH completely, but did you try perf stat? perf
> > record is not supposed to work on SH due to the hardware not having an
> > overflow interrupt.
>
> perf record does work to some degree. It definitely worked before
> applying your changes but not after. I admit I haven't really read the
> perf event code, but Paul will know.

Ok, let me look at that again.

> > Which made me think, what on SH guarantees we update the counter often
> > enough not to suffer from counter wrap? Would it make sense to make the
> > SH code hook into their arch tick handler and update the counters from
> > there?
>
> This was the way that the oprofile code used to work. Paul and I were
> talking about using a hrtimer to sample performance counters as
> opposed to piggy-backing on the tick handler.

Ah, for sampling for sure, simply group a software perf event and a
hardware perf event together and use PERF_SAMPLE_READ.

But suppose its a non sampling counter, how do you avoid overflows of
the hardware register?