Vince Weaver reported a 'perf stat' measurement overhead in the
count of retired instructions, which can amount to a +6000
instructions inflated count in the reported count.
At present, perf stat creates its counters on the perf process. Thus
the counters count the fork and various other activity in both the
parent and child, such as the resolver overhead for resolving PLT
entries for any libc functions that haven't been called before, such
as execvp.
This reduces the overhead by creating the counters on the child process
after the fork, using a couple of pipes to synchronize so that the
child process waits until the parent has created the counters before
doing the exec. To eliminate the PLT resolution overhead on calling
execvp, this does a dummy execvp first which will always fail.
With this, the overhead of executing a program goes down from over
4800 instructions to about 90 instructions on powerpc (32-bit).
This was measured with a statically-linked program written in
assembler which only does the 3 instructions needed to call _exit(0).
Before:
$ perf stat -e 0:1:u ./three
Performance counter stats for './three':
4858 instructions
0.001274523 seconds time elapsed
After:
$ perf stat -e 0:1:u ./three
Performance counter stats for './three':
92 instructions
0.000468153 seconds time elapsed
Reported-by: Vince Weaver <vince@deater.net>
Signed-off-by: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
LKML-Reference: <19016.41425.814043.870352@cargo.ozlabs.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Peter expressed a strong preference for percentage based
display of scaled values - so revert to that from the
recently introduced multiplication-factor unit.
Reported-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Jaswinder Singh Rajput <jaswinder@kernel.org>
Cc: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>
Cc: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Cc: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
LKML-Reference: <new-submission>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Set attrs and nr_counters if no event is selected and !null_run.
Setting of attrs should depend on number of counters,
so we need to memcpy only for sizeof(default_attrs)
Also set nr_counters as ARRAY_SIZE(default_attrs) in place of
hardcoded value.
Signed-off-by: Jaswinder Singh Rajput <jaswinderrajput@gmail.com>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
LKML-Reference: <1246126749.32198.16.camel@hpdv5.satnam>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
In multi-run (-r/--repeat) printouts, print out the noise of
the wall-clock average as well.
Also, fix a bug in printing out scaled counters: if it was not
scaled then we should not update the average with -1.
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>
Cc: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Cc: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
LKML-Reference: <new-submission>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Allow a no-counters run. This can be useful to measure just
elapsed wall-clock time - or to assess the raw overhead of perf
stat itself, without running any counters.
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>
Cc: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Cc: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
LKML-Reference: <new-submission>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Remove dead code and do some code alignment.
Signed-off-by: Jaswinder Singh Rajput <jaswinderrajput@gmail.com>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
LKML-Reference: <1245847774.2681.2.camel@ht.satnam>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Error message should use stderr for verbose (-v), otherwise
message will be lost for:
$ ./perf stat -v <cmd> > /dev/null
For example on AMD bus-cycles event is not available so now
it looks like:
$ ./perf stat -v -e bus-cycles ls > /dev/null
Error: counter 0, sys_perf_counter_open() syscall returned with -1 (Invalid argument)
Performance counter stats for 'ls':
<not counted> bus-cycles
0.006765877 seconds time elapsed.
Signed-off-by: Jaswinder Singh Rajput <jaswinderrajput@gmail.com>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
LKML-Reference: <1245757369.3776.1.camel@localhost.localdomain>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
On 64-bit powerpc, __u64 is defined to be unsigned long rather than
unsigned long long. This causes compiler warnings every time we
print a __u64 value with %Lx.
Rather than changing __u64, we define our own u64 to be unsigned long
long on all architectures, and similarly s64 as signed long long.
For consistency we also define u32, s32, u16, s16, u8 and s8. These
definitions are put in a new header, types.h, because these definitions
are needed in util/string.h and util/symbol.h.
The main change here is the mechanical change of __[us]{64,32,16,8}
to remove the "__". The other changes are:
* Create types.h
* Include types.h in perf.h, util/string.h and util/symbol.h
* Add types.h to the LIB_H definition in Makefile
* Added (u64) casts in process_overflow_event() and print_sym_table()
to kill two remaining warnings.
Signed-off-by: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Acked-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: benh@kernel.crashing.org
LKML-Reference: <19003.33494.495844.956580@cargo.ozlabs.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Add the --repeat <n> feature to perf stat, which repeats a given
command up to a 100 times, collects the stats and calculates an
average and a stddev.
For example, the following oneliner 'perf stat' command runs hackbench
5 times and prints a tabulated result of all metrics, with averages
and noise levels (in percentage) printed:
aldebaran:~/linux/linux/tools/perf> ./perf stat --repeat 5 ~/hackbench 10
Time: 0.117
Time: 0.108
Time: 0.089
Time: 0.088
Time: 0.100
Performance counter stats for '/home/mingo/hackbench 10' (5 runs):
1243.989586 task-clock-msecs # 10.460 CPUs ( +- 4.720% )
47706 context-switches # 0.038 M/sec ( +- 19.706% )
387 CPU-migrations # 0.000 M/sec ( +- 3.608% )
17793 page-faults # 0.014 M/sec ( +- 0.354% )
3770941606 cycles # 3031.329 M/sec ( +- 4.621% )
1566372416 instructions # 0.415 IPC ( +- 2.703% )
16783421 cache-references # 13.492 M/sec ( +- 5.202% )
7128590 cache-misses # 5.730 M/sec ( +- 7.420% )
0.118924455 seconds time elapsed.
The goal of this feature is to allow the reliance on these accurate
statistics and to know how many times a command has to be repeated
for the noise to go down to an acceptable level.
(The -v option can be used to see a line printed out as each run progresses.)
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>
Cc: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Cc: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
LKML-Reference: <new-submission>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
- use IPC for the instruction normalization output
- CPUs for the CPU utilization factor value.
- print out time elapsed like the other rows
- tidy up the task-clocks/cpu-clocks printout
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>
Cc: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Cc: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
LKML-Reference: <new-submission>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Pure renames only, to PERF_COUNT_HW_* and PERF_COUNT_SW_*.
Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>
Cc: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Cc: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
LKML-Reference: <new-submission>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Currently report and stat catch SIGINT (and others) without altering
their exit state. This means that things like:
while :; do perf stat ./foo ; done
Loops become hard-to-interrupt, because bash never sees perf terminate
due to interruption. Fix this.
Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>
Cc: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Cc: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
LKML-Reference: <new-submission>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Before:
$ perf stat ~/hackbench 5
error: syscall returned with -1 (No such device)
After:
$ perf stat ~/hackbench 5
Time: 1.640
Performance counter stats for '/home/mingo/hackbench 5':
6524.570382 task-clock-ticks # 3.838 CPU utilization factor
35704 context-switches # 0.005 M/sec
191 CPU-migrations # 0.000 M/sec
8958 page-faults # 0.001 M/sec
<not counted> cycles
<not counted> instructions
<not counted> cache-references
<not counted> cache-misses
Wall-clock time elapsed: 1699.999995 msecs
Also add -v (--verbose) option to allow the printing of failed
counter opens.
Plus dont print 'inf' if wall-time is zero (due to jiffies granularity),
instead skip the printing of the CPU utilization factor.
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>
Cc: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Cc: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
LKML-Reference: <new-submission>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Several people have suggested that 'perf' has become a full-fledged
tool that should be moved out of Documentation/. Move it to the
(new) tools/ directory.
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>
Cc: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Cc: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
LKML-Reference: <new-submission>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Paul Mackerras