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NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | EVENT DETECTION | EVENT STRINGS | ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES | AUTHORS | SEE ALSO | COLOPHON |
LIBPFM(3) Linux Programmer's Manual LIBPFM(3)
libpfm - a helper library to develop monitoring tools
#include <perfmon/pfmlib.h>
This is a helper library used by applications to program specific
performance monitoring events. Those events are typically provided by
the hardware or the OS kernel. The most common hardware events are
provided by the Performance Monitoring Unit (PMU) of modern
processors. They can measure elapsed cycles or the number of cache
misses. Software events usually count kernel events such as the
number of context switches, or pages faults.
The library groups events based on which source is providing them.
The term PMU is generalized to any event source, not just hardware
sources. The library supports hardware performance events from most
common processors, each group under a specific PMU name, such as
Intel Core, IBM Power 6.
Programming events is usually done through a kernel API, such as
Oprofile, perfmon, perfctr, or perf_events on Linux. The library
provides support for perf_events which is available in the Linux
kernel as of v2.6.31. Perf_events supports selected PMU models and
several software events.
At its core, the library provides a simple translation service,
whereby a user specifies an event to measure as a string and the
library returns the parameters needed to invoke the kernel API. It is
important to realize that the library does not make the system call
to program the event.
Note: You must first call pfm_initialize() in order to use any of the
other provided functions in the library.
A first part of the library provides an event listing and query
interface. This can be used to discover the events available on a
specific hardware platform.
The second part of the library provides a set of functions to obtain
event encodings form event strings. Event encoding depends primarily
on the underlying hardware but also on the kernel API. The library
offers a generic API to address the first situation but it also
provides entry points for specific kernel APIs such as perf_events.
In that case, it is able to prepare the data structure which must be
passed to the kernel to program a specific event.
When the library is initialized via pfm_initialize(), it first
detects the underlying hardware and software configuration. Based on
this information it enables certain PMU support. Multiple events
tables may be activated.
It is possible to force activation of a specific PMU (group of
events) using an environment variable.
Events are expressed as strings. Those string are structured and may
contain several components depending on the type of event and the
underlying hardware.
String parsing is always case insensitive.
The string structure is defined as follows:
[pmu::][event_name][:unit_mask][:modifier|:modifier=val]
or
[pmu::][event_name][.unit_mask][.modifier|.modifier=val]
The components are defined as follows:
pmu Optional name of the PMU (group of events) to which the event
belongs to. This is useful to disambiguate events in case
events from difference sources have the same name. If not
specified, the first match is used.
event_name
The name of the event. It must be the complete name, partial
matches are not accepted. This component is required.
unit_mask
This designate an optional sub-events. Some events can be
refined using sub-events. Event may have multiple unit masks
and it may or may be possible to combine them. If more than
one unit masks needs to be passed, then the [:unit_mask]
pattern can be repeated.
modifier
A modifier is an optional filter which modifies how the event
counts. Modifiers have a type and a value. The value is
specified after the equal sign. No space is allowed. In case
of boolean modifiers, it is possible to omit the value true
(1). The presence of the modifier is interpreted as meaning
true. Events may support multiple modifiers, in which case the
[:modifier|:modifier=val] pattern can be repeated. The is no
ordering constraint between modifier and unit masks. Modifiers
may be specified before unit masks and vice-versa.
It is possible to enable certain debug features of the library using
environment variables. The following variables are defined:
LIBPFM_VERBOSE
Enable verbose output. Value must be 0 or 1.
LIBPFM_DEBUG
Enable debug output. Value must be 0 or 1
LIBPFM_DEBUG_STDOUT
Redirect verbose and debug output to the standard output file
descriptor (stdout). By default, the output is directed to
the standard error file descriptor (stderr).
LIBPFM_FORCE_PMU
Force a specific PMU model to be activated. In this mode, only
that one model is activated. The value of the variable must be
the PMU name as returned by the pfm_get_pmu_name() function.
Note for some PMU models, it may be possible to specify
additional options, such as specific processor models or
stepping. Additional parameters necessarily appears after a
comma. For instance, LIBPFM_FORCE_PMU=amd64,16,2,1.
LIBPFM_ENCODE_INACTIVE
Set this variable to 1 to enable encoding of events for non
detected, but supported, PMUs models.
LIBPFM_DISABLED_PMUS
Provides a list of PMU models to disable. This is a comma
separated list of PMU models. The PMU model is the string in
name field of the pfm_pmu_info_t structure. For instance:
LIBPFM_DISABLE_PMUS=core,snb, will disable both the Intel Core
and SandyBridge core PMU support.
Stephane Eranian <eranian@gmail.com>
Robert Richter <robert.richter@amd.com>
libpfm_amd64_k7(3), libpfm_amd64_k8(3), libpfm_amd64_fam10h(3),
libpfm_intel_core(3), libpfm_intel_atom(3), libpfm_intel_p6(3),
libpfm_intel_nhm(3), libpfm_intel_nhm_unc(3),
pfm_get_perf_event_encoding(3), pfm_initialize(3)
Some examples are shipped with the library
This page is part of the perfmon2 (a performance monitoring library)
project. Information about the project can be found at
⟨http://perfmon2.sourceforge.net/⟩. If you have a bug report for this
manual page, send it to perfmon2-devel@lists.sourceforge.net. This
page was obtained from the project's upstream Git repository
⟨git://git.code.sf.net/p/perfmon2/libpfm4⟩ on 2017-07-05. If you dis‐
cover any rendering problems in this HTML version of the page, or you
believe there is a better or more up-to-date source for the page, or
you have corrections or improvements to the information in this
COLOPHON (which is not part of the original manual page), send a mail
to man-pages@man7.org
May, 2010 LIBPFM(3)