From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk Subject: Re: Perfctr-Xen framework for permonace analysis Date: Mon, 15 Aug 2011 11:21:38 -0400 Message-ID: <20110815152138.GA22781@dumpdata.com> References: <395284.39970.qm@web113610.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Return-path: Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <395284.39970.qm@web113610.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> List-Unsubscribe: , List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Sender: xen-devel-bounces@lists.xensource.com Errors-To: xen-devel-bounces@lists.xensource.com To: Ruslan Nikolaev Cc: xen-devel@lists.xensource.com List-Id: xen-devel@lists.xenproject.org On Thu, May 12, 2011 at 12:36:07PM -0700, Ruslan Nikolaev wrote: > Hi > > I want to make an announcement about new perfomance monitoring framework. > > Perfctr-Xen framework that enables per-thread performance analysis in Xen. Current version is capable of properly virtualizing counters in both paravirtualized and HVM modes. It is based on perfctr (which is a library and kernel module for non-virtualized guests), ported to Xen, and extended to work properly in virtualized environment. Both accumulative and interrupt modes counting (profiling) are supported. > > The advantage of Perfctr-Xen is that it does not require specific HVM extensions which are needed for vpmu driver, can work in paravirtualized mode, and it also quite universal: works with many common tools such as PAPI, HPCToolkit, TAU PerfExplorer. It supports proper per-domain and per-thread virtualization. It is light-weight, supports wide range of CPUs, does not require save-and-restore for accumulative mode of counting (it uses counter offsetting), avoids expensive hypercalls and counter re-programming in certain circumstances (when threads are counting the same type of events). In addition, some techniques are employed to account for the overhead caused by the framework itself. This makes measurements quite accurate. > > Perfctr-Xen consists of series of patches that need to be applied to Xen, Linux, perfctr. There are available at: > http://people.cs.vt.edu/~rnikola/ > > The code is available under LGPL. It would be great to discuss if and how it can be integrated into Xen. So I read your guys paper and found it interesting. But I am bit confused about the baremetal state of perf monitoring tool. Which one is in the upstream kernel (3.0) that runs when you use 'perftop' and like? > > The publication regarding Perfctr-Xen is at: > http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1952687 > > Thanks, > Ruslan Nikolaev > > _______________________________________________ > Xen-devel mailing list > Xen-devel@lists.xensource.com > http://lists.xensource.com/xen-devel