Related Work

Links to reported research and other open-source projects using CPU PMCs:

• Exploiting Hardware Performance Counters with Flow and Context Sensitive Profiling, Glenn Ammons, Thomas Ball, James R. Larus, 1997.
  This is the paper that got me thinking about building a next-generation profiling system for FreeBSD.

Under Linux there are three projects that use in-CPU performance counters for performance measurements:

• Perfctr
  A driver for Linux kernels that provides per-process “virtual” hardware performance counters. It is distributed in the form of a source patch.
• Oprofile
  A Linux kernel driver that does “whole system” profiling using hardware performance counters. Oprofile does not support using PMCs for simple counting or for process-specific sampling. It is however present in most Linux-based distributions.
• Perfmon2
  Perfmon2 is the Linux kernel profiling & performance measurement framework that comes the closest to PmcTools in terms of features. It supports process-mode and system-wide modes of operation and can do profiling as well as counting. Perfmon2 has support for callgraphs (which hwpmc(4) doesn't do yet), but does not do remote profiling. It also doesn't appear to do cross-architecture profiles.
  Perfmon2 is distributed in the form of a patch.

There is also an additional older project: Rabbit, from the AMES Lab.

NetBSD's implementation of a PMC API: NetBSD/pmc(3):

http://www.daemon-systems.org/man/pmc.9.html (This link is broken). Possible link from archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20180218094454/https://www.daemon-systems.org/man/pmc.9.html

Solaris™ has a CDC(3EXT) API for accessing CPU performance counters. It supports the CPUs that Solaris™ runs on.

These tools use build over the lower layers and provide visualization and easy to use interfaces:

• Prospect
  Measurement tools for Linux that use the Oprofile driver.
• PAPI
  A cross platform open-source API for performance measurement. See:
  • End-user Tools for Application Performance Analysis Using Hardware Counters, K. London, J. Dongarra, S. Moore, P. Mucci, K. Seymour, T. Spencer, 2001.
    Short descriptions of PAPI-based tools that represent performance information graphically.
  • A Scalable Cross-Platform Infrastructure for Application Performance Tuning Using Hardware Counters, S. Browne, J. Dongarra, N. Garner, K. London, P. Mucci, 2000.
    An introduction to PAPI.
  • SvPablo: A Multi-Language Performance Analysis System, Luiz De Rose, Ying Zhang, Daniel A. Reed, 1998.
    A language independent performance analysis and visualization system.
• DynInst
  An API for patching running binaries. Useful for adding performance monitoring instrumentation to running applications. See:
  • The Paradyn Parallel Performance Measurement Tools, Barton P. Miller Mark D. Callaghan Jonathan M. Cargille Jeffrey K…., 1995.
• KProf
  A profile data visualization tool based on KDE.