Re: [RFC] [PATCH 1/1] perf: add support for arch-dependent symbolic event names to "perf stat"

[Corey Ashford <cjashfor@linux.vnet.ibm.com>]

(I posted this yesterday, but I think LKML rejected it because there was more
quoted text than my text.  So I am reposting with no quoted text).

A couple of follow-up comments on this patch:

This functionality was designed to provide a generalized interface to an 
external event name -> attr struct library, such as libpfm4.  libpfm4 has an 
interface that nearly exactly matches parse_*_event() profiles, so it's quite 
easy to write a small wrapper function to call libpfm4's function.

Ingo Molnar discussed adding some visibility to the arch-dependent event names 
through some other interface, such as through /sys/devices/pmus perhaps, but 
that discussion is a long way (as far as I know) from having something usable 
today.  So you could think of this external library approach to be a stop-gap 
until something better is developed.  When/if that new event naming mechanism 
becomes available, we can easily remove this external library support from perf.

-- 
Regards,

- Corey

Corey Ashford
Software Engineer
IBM Linux Technology Center, Linux Toolchain
Beaverton, OR
cjashfor@us.ibm.com