PAPI & Related Systems for CPU/Memory Performance Monitoring

[esithole]

All,

I’m new to PAPI. I would like to know if other related implementations used in capturing performance stats on CPU/Memory hardware such as the AMD Code Analyst, Intel VTune, FreeBSD HWPMC & PerfMonitor tools depend on the PAPI functionality in order to interface to the CPU Performance Monitoring Counters or if they instead employ their own in-house strategies for accessing and measuring the processor & cache memory events.

Thanks in advance for your help.

[admin]

Hi -
You've cut a pretty broad swath here. In general, the tools you've listed use their own methods for accessing the performance counters. AMD's Code Analyst and Intel's VTune are both vendor specific tools that measure counters on a system-wide basis rather than a per-process basis. The FreeBSD HWPMC is actually used by PAPI to get access to the counters. I don't know what you're referring to with PerfMonitor. PAPI itself is intended to be platform independent glue that links performance counters to performance tools. It uses whatever works to get access to the counters. For linux this has historically meant the perfctr or perfmon patch for the kernel, or more recently the built-in perf_events interface.
Hope this helps.