To: perfctr-devel@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: perfctr-2.6.0 released Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Version 2.6.0 of perfctr, the Linux/x86 performance monitoring counters driver, is now available at the usual place: http://www.csd.uu.se/~mikpe/linux/perfctr/ This is the new stable series of perfctr. The main feature changes since the previous stable series, perfctr-2.4, are: * Added support for 2.6 kernels and 64-bit AMD64 kernels. * Added support for AMD64, Pentium-M, and VIA Nehemiah processors. * 64-bit AMD64 kernels work with 32-bit x86 user-space binaries. * Much improved support for binary compatibility between different versions of the driver and user-space. * Improved layout of counter state objects. Fewer cache lines are touched at counter suspend/resume/sample operations. * More robust Pentium 4 support, especially for hyper-threaded P4s. * Extended cascading should work on P4 Model 2 CPUs. * The library contains data structures with event set and unit mask descriptions. (Complete except for P4.) * Support for kernels older than 2.4.16 has been dropped. Many people still use perfctr-2.4 because they also use PAPI (http://icl.cs.utk.edu/projects/papi/). I've made a separate patch available, patch-papi-2.3.4-perfctr-2.6, which applies to the current PAPI release and allows it to work also with perfctr-2.6. Changes from 2.6.0-pre5: Version 2.6.0, 2003-09-08 - The driver now kills a process' performance counters if the process migrates to a forbidden CPU. This ensures that unsafe changes to a process' CPU affinity mask don't break the driver, the hardware state, or other processes. (This is an issue on hyper-threaded P4s only.) - A bug fix in perfctr-2.6.0-pre3 broke compiling the driver non-modular in modular 2.4 kernels. Corrected that problem. / Mikael Pettersson