Hi Stephane I have been following the discussions on this mailing list regarding the unsolicited proposal made by Ingo Molnar to provide an interface to the PMU.
With this new proposal it now appear to me like the following 4 alternatives are available to access the PMU (on an X86_64 system): perfctr perfmon2 perfmon3 Ingo's proposal (does it have a name ?) I work for Bull Information Systems and we are currently planning to build a linux distribution that likely will be based on a 2.6.29 kernel (possibly from RHEL6) and we are trying to decide what we should include in this distribution for PMU access. Our previous X86_64 distributions have included perfctr because they were based on RHEL5 and we were unable to get perfmon2 to work in the 2.6.18 (heavily patched) kernel delivered by Redhat. My understanding of your reason for creating perfmon3 was to restructure the syscall interface to appease the kernel.org people (in hopes of getting it included in the kernel.org downloads). Now that Ingo has submitted his counter proposal, it would seem like perfmon3 is no longer needed. Would you agree with this ?? There is some value to Bull to adopt the interface that will eventually be included in kernel.org downloads. However it is important to us that tools like pfmon and HPCToolkit using papi work correctly through the interface we choose. I think that our needs are pretty much limited to the X86_64 architecture. The latest mail I saw on this topic suggested you were considering creating a user library (like libpfm) that would convert the existing calls into Ingo's new syscall interface. Does this mean that you have accepted that Ingo's proposal will probably be the one delivered with kernel.org downloads ?? Thanks in advance for any information you can provide that will help us make good choices. Gary ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Open Source Business Conference (OSBC), March 24-25, 2009, San Francisco, CA -OSBC tackles the biggest issue in open source: Open Sourcing the Enterprise -Strategies to boost innovation and cut costs with open source participation -Receive a $600 discount off the registration fee with the source code: SFAD http://p.sf.net/sfu/XcvMzF8H _______________________________________________ perfmon2-devel mailing list perfmon2-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/perfmon2-devel
