====== Pmctools: Potential users of hwpmc(4) ======

This is a list of projects that could //use// hwpmc(4) and PMC based
performance measurements.

This page has some overlap with [[PmcTools/PmcResearch|PmcTools/PmcResearch]].

===== Dyninst =====

Port [[http://www.dyninst.org/|Dyninst]] or other
executable editing toolkit to %%FreeBSD%% and use it to
dynamically instrument executables to read PMC data
using the RDPMC instruction on x86 processors.  This
would allow us to do fine-grained measurement of i-
and d-cache behaviour inside 'hot' functions without
having the overhead of instrumenting //all// the
functions in an executable.  This feature would
probably useful in conjunction with the GUI tool
described in [[PmcTools/PmcResearch|PmcTools/PmcResearch]].

Dyninst however is distributed under an un-BSD-like license.
I'd really prefer to use an equivalent BSD-licensed library
if it exists.  See also: [[/ElfToolChain|ElfToolChain]].

===== PAPI for FreeBSD =====

Port over the PAPI interface to hwpmc. PAPI is a popular
programming interface for scientific applications that desire
to use hardware performance counters.

  * Project Home page: http://code.google.com/p/papi-for-freebsd/
  * People known to be working on PAPI porting include:
    * Harald Servat redcrash@gmail.com
    * George Neville-Neil gnn@freebsd.org

This work is available as a %%FreeBSD%% port ([[http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/ports.cgi?query=papi&stype=name&sektion=devel|/usr/ports/devel/papi]]).

The PAPI library currently works on modern Intel hardware including Penryn and Nehalem (as of 3.7.x)

===== A PmcTools based Performance Visualizer =====

Described in the [[PmcTools/PerformanceVisualizer|PmcTools/PerformanceVisualizer]] page.