Operation and Use, Volume 2

Appendix E. Understanding and Creating PCT Hardware Counter Groups

Using the Performance Collection Tool (PCT), you can add hardware counter probes to a target application to collect information on various hardware operations. We have collected similar or complementary hardware counters into groups, so that when you add one of these groups to a target application, information on different but related events are collected. The collected information can later be viewed and analyzed in the Profile Visualization Tool (PVT). The hardware counter groups available to you will differ depending on whether the processes you want to instrument are running on 604e CPUs or 630 CPUs.

If you are using the PCT's graphical user interface, the available counter groups are listed in the Select Performance Profiling Probes Panel:

View figure.

If you are using the PCT's command-line interface, you can list the available counter groups by issuing the profile show probetype hwcount subcommand:

pct> profile show probetype hwcount
Prof Type Name    Description
--------- ------- ------
0         FPU     FPU, FXU, and LSU operations
1         Branch  Branch operations
2         L1_TLB  L1 cache and TLB operations
3         L2      Prefetch and L2 cache operations
4         Fpop    Floating-point operations
5         xFPU    FPU, FXU, LSU, and BPU operations
pct>
 

For more information on the Select Performance Profiling Probes Panel and the PCT's graphical user interface, refer to the PCT's online help system (as described in Accessing the Performance Collection Tool's online help system). For more information on the profile show probetype hwcount subcommand, refer to Adding Hardware Profile Probes to Processes.

This appendix describes:

• the specific hardware counters in each of the hardware counter groups we supply. See Understanding the Default Hardware Counter Groups for more information.
• how you can create your own hardware counter groups using a configuration program we supply. See Creating Hardware Counter Groups for more information.