KernelTrap: Overview of the Perfmon2 Interface

“Stephane Eranian posted an overview of the perfmon2 interface,
highlighting key features. He begins, ‘the goal of the perfmon2
interface is to provide access to the hardware performance counters
present in all modern processors.’ He goes on to explain, ‘the
interface is designed to be builtin, very generic, flexible and
extensible. It is not designed to support a single application or a
small class of monitoring tools. The goal is to avoid fragmentation
where you have one tool using one interface. Because we want the
interface to be an integral part of the kernel, special care is
taken to make it robust and secure. The interface is uniform across
all hardware platforms, i.e., it offers the same level of software
functionalities on each platform…'”

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