Hi,

The following piece of code was given to us from our instructor so we could measure some algorithms performance:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <unistd.h>

static unsigned cyc_hi = 0, cyc_lo = 0;

static void access_counter(unsigned *hi, unsigned *lo) {
    asm("rdtsc; movl %%edx,%0; movl %%eax,%1"
    : "=r" (*hi), "=r" (*lo)
    : /* No input */
    : "%edx", "%eax");
}

void start_counter() {
    access_counter(&cyc_hi, &cyc_lo);
}

double get_counter() {
    unsigned ncyc_hi, ncyc_lo, hi, lo, borrow;
    double result;

    access_counter(&ncyc_hi, &ncyc_lo);

    lo = ncyc_lo - cyc_lo;
    borrow = lo > ncyc_lo;
    hi = ncyc_hi - cyc_hi - borrow;

    result = (double) hi * (1 << 30) * 4 + lo;

    return result;
}

However, I need this code to be portable to machines with different CPU frequencies. For that, I'm trying to calculate the CPU frequency of the machine where the code is being run like this:

int main(void)
{
    double c1, c2;

    start_counter();

    c1 = get_counter();
    sleep(1);
    c2 = get_counter();

    printf("CPU Frequency: %.1f MHz\n", (c2-c1)/1E6);
    printf("CPU Frequency: %.1f GHz\n", (c2-c1)/1E9);

    return 0;
}

The problem is that the result is always 0 and I can't understand why. I'm running Linux (Arch) as guest on VMware.

On a friend's machine (MacBook) it is working to some extent; I mean, the result is bigger than 0 but it's variable because the CPU frequency is not fixed (we tried to fix it but for some reason we are not able to do it). He has a different machine which is running Linux (Ubuntu) as host and it also reports 0. This rules out the problem being on the virtual machine, which I thought it was the issue at first.

Any ideas why this is happening and how can I fix it?