Performance Overhead of Perf Event Subsystem in Linux Kernel

Posted by Bo Xiao on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Bo Xiao
Published on 2010-05-08T13:11:50Z Indexed on 2010/05/08 13:18 UTC
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Filed under:

linux

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performancecounter

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overhead

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ftrace

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profiler

Performance counters for Linux are a new kernel-based subsystem that provide a framework for all things performance analysis. It covers hardware level (CPU/PMU, Performance Monitoring Unit) features and software features (software counters, tracepoints) as well. Since 2.6.33, the kernel provide 'perf_event_create_kernel_counter' kernel api for developers to create kernel counter to collect system runtime information. What I concern most is the performance impact on overall system when tracepoint/ftrace is enabled. There are no docs I can find about them. I was once told that ftrace was implemented by dynamically patching code, will it slow the system dramatically?

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