Tony,

On Wed, Jan 03, 2007 at 10:19:34AM -0800, Luck, Tony wrote:
> > These experiments should be run twice: one set with an event that is
> > only triggered in the user-space (e.g. FP op counting) and a second
> > set an event that occurs both in kernel and user space.
> 
> Some architectures do some floating point operations in the
> kernel (e.g. ia64 ... gcc generates code that uses the FPU for
> integer multiply).  So you may not be able to use a strictly
> "kernel count must be zero" for FP operation events.
> 
Yes.

> Perhaps this can be inverted ... find an event that is only triggered
> by a privileged instruction ... so you can see some "kernel only"
> counting happening.  Still have the problem of determining whether
> the value you see is sane.  You could compare results across different
> time intervals (while running the same load) and check that the counts
> scale correctly.
> 
I am not sure we can find an event that can only be triggered by privileged code
and which would exist across X86, IA-64 to a bare minimum, especially if you
consider the various flavors of X86. If you limit yourself to Ia-64 and Core 2 
Duo,
then you may be able to find something interrupt or VM related.

-- 
-Stephane
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