Do perfctr and Oprofile live together?

[Memo]

Hi,

Let's populate the forum a little bit

I am using CodeAnalyst on an AMD Opteron, which uses a modified Oprofile by patching the kernel to include CAKM (Code Analyst Kernel modules). I also would like to have PAPI on the same kernel, so I plan to patch the same kernel with perfctr. Is there any known conflicts between these two libraries? Can they live together?

Thanks so much in advance!

[maynardj]

I would say it depends on the architecture-specific implementations of both perfctr and OProfile. I can only speak for the IBM POWER processor architecture, as that's what I'm familiar with. On that platform, both the OProfile kernel driver and the perfctr kernel driver negotiate reserving/releasing the PMU hardware via the arch-specific kernel calls 'reserve[release]_pmc_hardware()'. So, on the POWER platform, OProfile and perfctr can coexist, but just can't be used simultaneously.

-Maynard