unikernels and unified projects [LWN.net]

unikernels and unified projects

Posted Mar 23, 2010 22:49 UTC (Tue) by mingo (subscriber, #31122)
In reply to: unikernels and unified projects by ejr
Parent article: KVM, QEMU, and kernel project management

Again, OProfile is not the right target. It has never been a player outside Linux kernel folks. [...] Oprofile was used well beyond the kernel: it was the main profiler used for glibc development, Xorg development, Apache and many other OSS projects. It was what drove Linux PMU development, so naturally we concentrated on those usecases.

If you are arguing that those are not important then i disagree with you.

(/dev/perfctr on the other hand was an external driver that never saw enough use to find someone to push it upstream.)

[...] You refuse to do your homework and keep pulling out strawmen. Look up Paradyn, TAU, and PAPI.

FYI, PAPI has already been ported to the perf syscall, and both TAU and Paradyn are PAPI based - so they should work. I cannot see wide use of them beyond the HPC world, can you cite examples of big OSS projects making use of them?

In any case tools/perf/ does not try to be the exclusive user of the perf syscall - there are other user-space tools that make use of it.

Also, could you please skip the insults and the condescending tone?

Thanks, Ingo

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unikernels and unified projects

Posted Mar 26, 2010 9:43 UTC (Fri) by mingo (subscriber, #31122) [Link]

  I'm still waiting for perf to have half the features of the
  pfmon tool that came with perfmon2.

I know pfmon and as far as i'm aware perf currently has a lot more features than pfmon ever had.

That's obviously in stark contrast with your statement - so could you please cite the features that perf doesnt have? Either we missed them (and thus will implement them) or they are implemented but you are not aware of them.

Thanks, Ingo.

unikernels and unified projects

Posted Mar 26, 2010 21:41 UTC (Fri) by deater (subscriber, #11746) [Link]

ability to specify _all_ events by name, i.e. if I want "SNOOPQ_REQUESTS_OUTSTANDING.DATA" I can just say so, instead of having to look it up and then having to specify the unintuitive "r01b3".

Being able to specify an output file that is nice ascii text, dumped every time a counter hits a certain threshold. This is probably possible with perf, but the perf --help is hard to follow.

It would be nice to have a perf-only mailing list, but I guess that will never happen.

It would also be nice to be able to build perf without having to download the entire kernel tree, I often don't have the space or the bandwidth for hundreds of megabytes of kernel source when I just want to quick build perf on a new machine.