Recent versions of the perfctr package don't work with my version of perfex. However, they include a perfex program (which works a little differently from this version, both internally, and user-visibly), so I probably won't update my version of perfex.

	Name	Last modified	Size	Description
	Parent Directory		-
	ppc7450.html	2004-12-17 12:12	12K
	perfex.tar.gz	2000-12-03 13:36	2.7K
	pentium4	2003-04-09 19:45	2.3K

Linux Perfex

Linux perfex runs another program (similar to time) and reports the
resulting performance counter values.  Its command-line interface is a
simplified version of IRIX' perfex.


Requirements
------------
You need a Linux kernel with Mikael Pettersson's performance counter
patches (http://www.csd.uu.se/~mikpe/linux/perfctr/).  This program
has been tested with perfctr-1.6.


Building and Installing
-----------------------
make PERFDIR=/usr/src/perfctr-1.6
make install PREFIX=/usr/local

The values for the variables given above are the defaults, so if they
are ok for you, you don't need to specify them.


Usage
-----
perfex [-e event] ... command command-options

You have to specify the event selectors in hex.  The event selectors
values and the number of counters are processor-dependent.  E.g., the
Athlon/Duron has four performance counters; the event selectors are
specified in the "AMD Athlon Processor x86 Code Optimization Guide"
(http://www.amd.com/products/cpg/athlon/techdocs/pdf/22007.pdf),
p. 235-238.

As an example, the following line measures the number of retired
instructions in user and in system mode, and the number of branches
and taken branches in both modes on an Athlon:

perfex -e 4100c0 -e 4200c0 -e 4300c2 -e 4300c4 latex bench

The output looks like this:

tsc           :          2311704289
event 004100c0:          1928896018
event 004200c0:             9244180
event 004300c2:           382690877
event 004300c4:           291798134


Availability
------------
You may find information on newer versions of Linux perfex on
http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/linux-perfex.


Related Work
------------

lperfex (http://www.osc.edu/~troy/lperfex/) is P6-specific and based
on a different kernel patch, but more featureful.


Licensing
---------
Copyright (C) 1999-2000  Mikael Pettersson <mikpe@csd.uu.se>
Copyright (C) 2000 Anton Ertl <anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at>

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public
License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either
version 2.1 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This library is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU
Lesser General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public
License along with this library; if not, write to the Free Software
Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA  02111-1307  USA