perf stat: Basic support for TopDown in perf stat

Add basic plumbing for TopDown in perf stat

TopDown is intended to replace the frontend cycles idle/ backend cycles
idle metrics in standard perf stat output.  These metrics are not
reliable in many workloads, due to out of order effects.

This implements a new --topdown mode in perf stat (similar to
--transaction) that measures the pipe line bottlenecks using
standardized formulas. The measurement can be all done with 5 counters
(one fixed counter)

The result are four metrics:

FrontendBound, BackendBound, BadSpeculation, Retiring

that describe the CPU pipeline behavior on a high level.

The full top down methology has many hierarchical metrics.  This
implementation only supports level 1 which can be collected without
multiplexing. A full implementation of top down on top of perf is
available in pmu-tools toplev.  (http://github.com/andikleen/pmu-tools)

The current version works on Intel Core CPUs starting with Sandy Bridge,
and Atom CPUs starting with Silvermont.  In principle the generic
metrics should be also implementable on other out of order CPUs.

TopDown level 1 uses a set of abstracted metrics which are generic to
out of order CPU cores (although some CPUs may not implement all of
them):

  topdown-total-slots       Available slots in the pipeline
  topdown-slots-issued      Slots issued into the pipeline
  topdown-slots-retired     Slots successfully retired
  topdown-fetch-bubbles     Pipeline gaps in the frontend
  topdown-recovery-bubbles  Pipeline gaps during recovery
                            from misspeculation

These metrics then allow to compute four useful metrics:

FrontendBound, BackendBound, Retiring, BadSpeculation.

Add a new --topdown options to enable events.  When --topdown is
specified set up events for all topdown events supported by the kernel.
Add topdown-* as a special case to the event parser, as is needed for
all events containing -.

The actual code to compute the metrics is in follow-on patches.

v2: Use standard sysctl read function.
v3: Move x86 specific code to arch/
v4: Enable --metric-only implicitly for topdown.
v5: Add --single-thread option to not force per core mode
v6: Fix output order of topdown metrics
v7: Allow combining with -d
v8: Remove --single-thread again
v9: Rename functions, adding arch_ and topdown_.
v10: Expand man page and describe TopDown better
Paste intro into commit description.
Print error when malloc fails.

Signed-off-by: Andi Kleen <ak@linux.intel.com>
Acked-by: Jiri Olsa <jolsa@kernel.org>
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1464119559-17203-1-git-send-email-andi@firstfloor.org
Signed-off-by: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>

2 files changed, 28 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/tools/perf/arch/x86/util/Build b/tools/perf/arch/x86/util/Build
index 465970370f3e..4cd8a16b1b7b 100644
--- a/tools/perf/arch/x86/util/Build
+++ b/tools/perf/arch/x86/util/Build
@@ -3,6 +3,7 @@ libperf-y += tsc.o
 libperf-y += pmu.o
 libperf-y += kvm-stat.o
 libperf-y += perf_regs.o
+libperf-y += group.o
 
 libperf-$(CONFIG_DWARF) += dwarf-regs.o
 libperf-$(CONFIG_BPF_PROLOGUE) += dwarf-regs.o
diff --git a/tools/perf/arch/x86/util/group.c b/tools/perf/arch/x86/util/group.c
new file mode 100644
index 000000000000..37f92aa39a5d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/tools/perf/arch/x86/util/group.c
@@ -0,0 +1,27 @@
+#include <stdio.h>
+#include "api/fs/fs.h"
+#include "util/group.h"
+
+/*
+ * Check whether we can use a group for top down.
+ * Without a group may get bad results due to multiplexing.
+ */
+bool arch_topdown_check_group(bool *warn)
+{
+	int n;
+
+	if (sysctl__read_int("kernel/nmi_watchdog", &n) < 0)
+		return false;
+	if (n > 0) {
+		*warn = true;
+		return false;
+	}
+	return true;
+}
+
+void arch_topdown_group_warn(void)
+{
+	fprintf(stderr,
+		"nmi_watchdog enabled with topdown. May give wrong results.\n"
+		"Disable with echo 0 > /proc/sys/kernel/nmi_watchdog\n");
+}