Performance Measuring using Hardware Performance Monitoring Counters

by Alex Ray for MINIX 3

The three main utilities making up FreeBSD's PMCTools are ported to Minix3 from the bottom up. First hwpmc, the hardware driver that interacts with processors performance monitoring counter. Second, the library and API, libpmc, that allow programmers to take advantage of the driver. Finally, pmcstat, a utility that utilizes libpmc to make performance measurements on individual processes and the system as a whole. These tools can then be used to identify and treat performance sinks in Minix.