FreeBSD has "perfmon", the CPU performance monitoring interface. A majority of the Linux systems out there run on Intel CPUs. It is not hard to implement an interface for programming the CPU counters to measure a variety of events. However, there needs work to be done to use the so obtained data in a meaningful manner. The CPU counters can be coupled with various system tools that give us system statistics. The bottomline:
1. There are a few drivers and libraries for Linux that allow you to make use of CPU counters (at least for the x86). These don't seem to be much used.
2. Like Intel's VTune tool (which pertains mainly to code optimization), a tool could be written for Linux that gives extensive performance statistics, and helps in optimizing code. The infrastructure for such a tool is already there, IMHO.
3. For interested people, I could find (from some dust-laden hard disks:) pointers to related code and documents. I worked on this subject long back.
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FreeBSD has "perfmon", the CPU performance
:)
monitoring interface. A majority of the Linux
systems out there run on Intel CPUs. It is
not hard to implement an interface for
programming the CPU counters to measure
a variety of events. However, there needs
work to be done to use the so obtained data
in a meaningful manner. The CPU counters can
be coupled with various system tools that give
us system statistics. The bottomline:
1. There are a few drivers and libraries
for Linux that allow you to make use
of CPU counters (at least for the x86).
These don't seem to be much used.
2. Like Intel's VTune tool (which pertains
mainly to code optimization), a tool
could be written for Linux that gives
extensive performance statistics, and
helps in optimizing code. The
infrastructure for such a tool is already
there, IMHO.
3. For interested people, I could find
(from some dust-laden hard disks
pointers to related code and documents.
I worked on this subject long back.