pmc(3) is a performance measurement framework for FreeBSD which uses the hardware performance measurement counters in modern CPUs to provide low-overhead, non-intrusive, system-wide measurement of production systems.

The project consists in creating a graphical user interface (GUI) analysis tool. It will be based on the performance monitoring counters framework pmc(3) and pmclog(3), using in-cpu measurement counters. The PMC GUI will allow a visual detection of performance bottlenecks in the execution of a program.

Management / welcome screen: The user associates PMCs (measurements) and processes. A set of allowed measurements i.e. according to the CPU - will be proposed to the user. Target processes can be selected by mouse.

Display/monitoring: The user can see in realtime what is happening. Profiling will concern selected processes, threads, and children or descendant processes. Spots/rectangles will correspond to a code segment. There will be a time view of the spots, with 1-2-3D graphes and color codes. Eventually, an interactive link to the function or code of the program should be implemented.

For the first evaluation, the gui should allow to select a process and display basic peaces of information. For the second part, the implementation should be more complete and allow code analysis, based on statistics on CPU events.