Part 2 of a three part tutorial about Linux-tools PERF is now available.

Part 1 of the series shows how to find hot execution spots in an application program. It demonstrates the basic PERF commands using software performance events such as CPU clock ticks and page faults.

Part 2 of the series — just released — introduces hardware performance counters and events. I show how to count hardware events with PERF and how to compute and apply a few basic derived measurements (e.g., instructions per cycle, cache miss rate) for analysis. Part 3 is in development and will show how to use sampling to profile a program and to isolate performance issues in code.

All three parts of the series use the same simple, easy to understand example: matrix multiplication. One version of the matrix multiplication program illustrates the impact of severe performance issues and what to look for in PERF measurements. The issues are mitigated in the second, improved version of the program. PERF measurements for the improved program are presented for comparison.

The test platform is the latest second generation Raspberry Pi 2 running Raspbian Wheezy 3.18.9-v7+. The Raspberry Pi 2 has a 900MHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 (ARMv7) processor with 1GByte of primary memory. Although the tutorial series demonstrates PERF on Cortex-A7, the same PERF commands and analytical techniques can be employed on other architectures like x86.

A special note for Raspberry Pi users. The current stable distribution of Raspbian Wheezy — 3.18.7-v7+ February 2015 — does not support PERF hardware events. Full PERF support was enabled in a later, intermediate release and full PERF support should be available in the next stable release of Raspbian Wheezy. In the meantime, Raspberry Pi 2 users may profile their programs using PERF software events as shown in Part 1 of the tutorial. First generation Raspberry Pi users are also restricted to software performance events.

Brave souls may try rpi-update to upgrade to the latest and possibly unstable release. I recommend waiting for the next stable release unless you really, really know what you are doing and are willing to chance an unstable kernel with potentially catastrophic consequences.