Re: Enabling RDPMC in user space by default

From: Andi Kleen (ak_at_suse.de)
Date: 11/30/05

  • Next message: Gene Heskett: "Re: Gene's pcHDTV 3000 analog problem"
    Date:	Wed, 30 Nov 2005 04:38:08 +0100
    To: Zwane Mwaikambo <zwane@arm.linux.org.uk>
    
    

    > > Any comments on this?
    >
    > I think that this should be best left to a profiling tool to configure and
    > not a general kernel facility. I also have very little faith in processor
    > vendors not doing to performance counters what was done to the TSC.

    The use case would be small code snippets to benchmark some code
    or instructions. That normally can't be done with a external
    tool and exec'ing something would be quite awkward. Also
    I would like to allow this for normal users.

    The performance counters definitely share some properties with TSC already -
    they definitely won't be synced (because they don't tick in C states etc.)
    so if you change CPUs they won't be monotone.

    But I doubt we'll ever see them running at a different frequency than
    the current P state, which is the big problem RDTSC has now and that's
    why I'm looking for a replacement. That it's faster on P4 is just
    a bonus.

    However it looks like everybody except me hates the idea :/ Or perhaps
    a lot of the opposition was just against the reasonable position
    that profiling should not disturb the NMI watchdogs. I guess not
    everybody values debuggable kernel dumps.

    -Andi

    -
    To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
    the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
    More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
    Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/


  • Next message: Gene Heskett: "Re: Gene's pcHDTV 3000 analog problem"

    Relevant Pages

    • Re: [PATCH] add stricmp
      ... usable strnicmp safe for general kernel use would be ... >full all singing all dancing UTF-8 symbol aware arbitary locale ... send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in ...
      (Linux-Kernel)
    • Re: [PATCH] add stricmp
      ... On Iau, 2005-09-08 at 17:45 +0200, Jan Beulich wrote: ... usable strnicmp safe for general kernel use would be ... send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in ...
      (Linux-Kernel)