ucevent uncore monitoring tool available

I released the ucevent Intel server uncore monitoring tool as part of pmu-tools.

http://github.com/andikleen/pmu-tools

The largest part of modern CPUs is outside the actual cores. On Intel CPUs this is part is called the "Uncore" and and has last level caches, PCI-Express, memory controller, QPI, power management and other functionalities. To understand its performance the uncore also provides a range of performance monitoring units (PMU) with performance counters that can count various events.

This can be useful to monitor power management, IO bandwidth, memory bandwidth, QPI (interconnect) traffic, cache hit rates and other metrics. The Linux kernel as part of perf has an uncore driver for Xeon systems since Linux 3.8. But since the uncore is complex, and the perf tool's view of them is quite raw, they have been hard to use directly.

ucevent is a tool that provides a generic uncore event list, standard equations and an (as friendly as possible) frontend to the uncore metrics. It runs as a wrapper around perf stat. The output is similar to turbostat.

The tool can be used directly to monitor, or to prototype/resolve uncore events for other tools.

The tool currently requires a Intel Xeon E5 2600 series (SandyBridge EP) CPU and a patched 3.10 kernel, and a BIOS that enables uncore monitoring.

For more details please see the ucevent documentation

https://github.com/andikleen/pmu-tools/tree/master/ucevent#ucevent-uncore-monitoring

-Andi

[email protected] -- Speaking for myself only.