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FreeBSD has a number of utilities that could be used for performance measurement.

sa(8) , accton(8) and acct(2) system statistics
ac(8) connect time reporting.
ktrace(1) , ktrace(2) and truss(1)
sysctl(8) and sysctl(3)
perfmon(9) the kernel driver accessing Intel Pentium(R) chip performance counters (not SMP safe).

There seem to be a number of open-source efforts that we could refer to for our work.

Perfctr, a driver for Linux kernels that provides per-process "virtual" hardware performance counters.
Oprofile is a Linux kernel driver that does "whole system" profiling using hardware performance counters.
Prospect has measurement tools for Linux that use the Oprofile driver.
Rabbit from AMES Lab, also for Linux
PAPI: A cross platform open-source API for performance measurement.
DynInst: An API for patching running binaries. Useful for adding performance monitoring instrumentation to running applications.
KProf: A profile data visualization tool based on KDE.
NetBSD -CURRENT now has a pmc(3) API.

The Athlon processor from AMD has support for counting hardware events like cache misses and TLB misses. XXX: Fill in URL.

Nearly every major system's manufacturer offers good system profiling support:

HP Caliper exports an API for performance tool writers to write tools against. XXX: URL required.
MPE/iX also from HP, used to have excellent statistics and performance trend analyses tools (named GLANCEXL and GLANCE/iX).
(what does IBM have?)
(Industry standards for this area)?
... others ...

The Digital Continuous Profiling Infrastructure paper describes the use of hardware performance counters on the DEC Alpha chip to do low-overhead profiling of production systems.

Related tools---mostly getting the development tools in -ports to use the new features introduced by this code.

Item	State	Description
DynInst	-	The DynInst library allows you to attach code snippets to a running executable. We could use this to instrument processes with performance measurement code.
PAPI	-	The PAPI library provides a cross-platform abstraction to hardware performance counters. Make a port of this library to FreeBSD.
GCC -finstrument-functions	-	On the i386 and similar platforms, use GCC's -finstrument-functions hook to use hwpmc(4) and RDPMC instructions to generate PMC based profiles.
Profiling (-p) with PMC interrupts	-	Since hwpmc(4) allows one to generate SIGPROF interrupts whenever process-virtual counters overflow, use these to provide process-specific statistical profiling driven by PMC counts.
Kprof or other profile visualizer tools	-	Hook up hwpmc(4) to a snazzy visualization tool for profile data.

Contact: jkoshy@FreeBSD.org

Last Modified: Sat Apr 21 22:53:23 2007

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