From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: George Dunlap Subject: Re: Perfctr-Xen framework for permonace analysis Date: Fri, 13 May 2011 14:59:25 +0100 Message-ID: References: <395284.39970.qm@web113610.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Return-path: 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 8:36 PM, 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 para= virtualized and HVM modes. It is based on perfctr (which is a library and k= ernel module for non-virtualized guests), ported to Xen, and extended to wo= rk properly in virtualized environment. Both accumulative and interrupt mod= es counting (profiling) are supported. > > The advantage of Perfctr-Xen is that it does not require specific HVM ext= ensions which are needed for vpmu driver, can work in paravirtualized mode,= and it also quite universal: works with many common tools such as PAPI, HP= CToolkit, TAU PerfExplorer. It supports proper per-domain and per-thread vi= rtualization. It is light-weight, supports wide range of CPUs, does not req= uire save-and-restore for accumulative mode of counting (it uses counter of= fsetting), avoids expensive hypercalls and counter re-programming in certai= n circumstances (when threads are counting the same type of events). In add= ition, some techniques are employed to account for the overhead caused by t= he 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. > > The publication regarding Perfctr-Xen is at: > http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3D1952687 Do you have this paper, or perhaps a pre-print, posted somewhere not behind a paywall? Or a different document describing the library in detail? Most of us don't have subscriptions to ACM... -George