To: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: [Announce] Version 2.0 of x86 performance counters driver

I'm pleased to announce perfctr-2.0, the second major release
of my Linux/x86 performance counters driver. It can be downloaded
from <http://www.csd.uu.se/~mikpe/linux/perfctr/> as usual.

The new perfctr-devel mailing list is an open forum for driver
snapshot announcements and general discussions about the perfctr
driver and its usage. To subscribe to perfctr-devel, visit
<http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/perfctr-devel>.

The driver package contains detailed changes and feature lists;
the main changes since perfctr-1.9, the last snapshot announced
to lkml, are:

- A number of bug fixes, including a module usage accounting change
  which should make things more robust on 2.2 kernels, and a fix
  which should make reliable counting possible on big SMP boxes.

- There is a new "perfex" example program (clone of IRIX' perfex),
  which lets you set up and monitor performance counters for any
  other program. Example (P6): perfex -e 0x4100c0 gcc -v

- The APIs have been changed to focus on the counters instead of
  their control registers. This simplified a lot of things.

- Automatic inheritance of per-process perfctrs across fork() has
  been removed. It doesn't work very well (unless wait4() is modified),
  and the functionality can be implemented in user-space.

- Preliminary support for the VIA C3 and VIA Cyrix III processors.
  (I'm looking for testers. If you're willing to volunteer, please
  download the driver and configure it to run its "init time tests".)

- Tons of cleanups.

- Supports standard kernels (2.2.16-2.2.19, 2.4.1-2.4.7, 2.4.7-ac10)
  and RedHat 7.1's 2.4.3-12 kernel.

The Pentium 4 isn't yet supported, but I've been promised access
to a P4 box for testing, so the P4 should be supported "soon".

/ Mikael Pettersson