Gary, As someone who's delivered entire tool suites on systems, why don't you separate your tool stack vs. your kernel support? Linking the two of them will hinder your ability to deliver a tool stack to your users in the short term. Like with perfmon (and perfctr before), it ain't over 'till it's in-the-kernel.
The PCL stuff (from Ingo) still has lots of work to be done. People are jumping on the bandwagon quickly, [IMHO] because this guy is one of the gatekeeper's for the kernel. I have not seen anything technical that demonstrates superiority. Expecting this to be fully functional for any processor for 2.6.29 (and to provide perfmon[x]'s capabilities) is not that realistic. Keep in mind it took quite a while to build up the infrastructure for perfctr, perfmon and PAPI; in many cases the kernel support and the libraries were co-designed for each other's needs. PCL has evolved very differently, one could say in a vacuum. Short of IBM (who seem quite desperate for an in-the- mainline-kernel), I haven't seen a lot of folks rushing to port this. From my PAPI-like perspective (Dan can comment on the group's intentions), I don't see a port to PCL materializing until the API stabilizes and people with lots of money and lots of hardware start patching with it. I am sorry to hear about your troubles with 2.6.18 + perfmon2. If you'd like to pursue help with that, please contact me off list. Regards, Phil On Feb 18, 2009, at 11:23 AM, gary.m...@bull.com wrote: > > 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 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 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
