Subject: Re: [Perfctr-devel] Re: Enabling RDPMC in user space by default
From: Nicholas Miell <nmiell@comcast.net>
To: eranian@hpl.hp.com
Cc: Andi Kleen <ak@suse.de>, Ray Bryant <raybry@mpdtxmail.amd.com>,
       discuss@x86-64.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org,
       perfctr-devel@lists.sourceforge.net
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Date: Wed, 30 Nov 2005 00:22:42 -0800
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On Tue, 2005-11-29 at 23:38 -0800, Stephane Eranian wrote:
> Nicholas,
> 
> On Tue, Nov 29, 2005 at 03:29:26PM -0800, Nicholas Miell wrote:
> > On Wed, 2005-11-30 at 00:17 +0100, Andi Kleen wrote:
> > > On Tue, Nov 29, 2005 at 03:02:18PM -0800, Nicholas Miell wrote:
> > > > On Tue, 2005-11-29 at 23:43 +0100, Andi Kleen wrote:
> > > > > To give an bad analogy RDTSC usage in the last years is
> > > > > like explicit spinning wait loops for delays in the earlier
> > > > > times. They tended to work on some subset of computers,
> > > > > but were always bad and caused problems and people eventually learned
> > > > > it was better to use operating system services for this.
> > > > 
> > > > And you are now suggesting people should use RDPMC instead of OS
> > > > services?
> > > 
> > > For any kind of timers they should use the OS service 
> > > (gettimeofday/clock_gettime). The OS will go to extraordinary
> > > means to make it as fast as possible, but when it's slow
> > > then because it's not possible to do it faster accurately
> > > (that's the case right now modulo one possible optimization)
> > > 
> > > For cycle counting where they previously used RDTSC they should
> > > use RDPMC 0 now.
> > 
> > Well, if that's all you want them to use RDPMC 0 for, why not just make
> > PMCs programmable from userspace?
> > 
> Simply because write a PERFSEL (i.e. an MSR) register is a privileged operation.

Well, yeah. Design an API (or just steal from Solaris) and expose that
to userspace.

-- 
Nicholas Miell <nmiell@comcast.net>

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