Messages in this thread |  | | | Date | Fri, 22 Apr 2011 11:23:22 +0200 | | From | Ingo Molnar <> | | Subject | Re: [PATCH 1/1] perf tools: Add missing user space support for config1/config2 |
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* Stephane Eranian <eranian@google.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 22, 2011 at 10:06 AM, Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu> wrote: > > > > * Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu> wrote: > > > >> This needs to be a *lot* more user friendly. Users do not want to type in > >> stupid hexa magic numbers to get profiling. We have moved beyond the oprofile > >> era really. > >> > >> Unless there's proper generalized and human usable support i'm leaning > >> towards turning off the offcore user-space accessible raw bits for now, and > >> use them only kernel-internally, for the cache events. > > Generic cache events are a myth. They are not usable. I keep getting > questions from users because nobody knows what they are actually counting, > thus nobody knows how to interpret the counts. You cannot really hide the > micro-architecture if you want to make any sensible measurements.
Well:
aldebaran:~> perf stat --repeat 10 -e instructions -e L1-dcache-loads -e L1-dcache-load-misses -e LLC-misses ./hackbench 10 Time: 0.125 Time: 0.136 Time: 0.180 Time: 0.103 Time: 0.097 Time: 0.125 Time: 0.104 Time: 0.125 Time: 0.114 Time: 0.158
Performance counter stats for './hackbench 10' (10 runs):
2,102,556,398 instructions # 0.000 IPC ( +- 1.179% ) 843,957,634 L1-dcache-loads ( +- 1.295% ) 130,007,361 L1-dcache-load-misses ( +- 3.281% ) 6,328,938 LLC-misses ( +- 3.969% )
0.146160287 seconds time elapsed ( +- 5.851% )
It's certainly useful if you want to get ballpark figures about cache behavior of an app and want to do comparisons.
There are inconsistencies in our generic cache events - but that's not really a reason to obcure their usage behind nonsensical microarchitecture-specific details.
But i'm definitely in favor of making these generalized events more consistent across different CPU types. Can you list examples of inconsistencies that we should resolve? (and which you possibly consider impossible to resolve, right?)
Thanks,
Ingo
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