Just wrapped up Part 3 of the Linux-tools PERF tutorial.

The tutorial now consists of three parts. Part 1 covers the most basic PERF commands and shows how to find program hot-spots using software performance events. Part 2 discusses hardware performance events and performance counters, and demonstrates how to measure hardware performance events using PERF counting mode. Part 2 introduces several derived performance metrics like instructions per second (IPC) and applies these metrics to the sample application programs.

Part 3 is the newest addition to the tutorial series. It builds on parts 1 and 2, showing how to use hardware performance events and counter sampling to profile an application program. Part 3 discusses sampling period and frequency, the sampling process, overhead, statistical accuracy/confidence and other practical concerns.

I hope you find the PERF tutorial to be useful in your work! Although I produced the example data on the ARM-based Raspberry Pi, the commands and techniques will also work on x86.