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PMC(1) General Commands Manual PMC(1)

pmc — performance-monitoring counter interface

pmc command [arguments]

The pmc tool can be used to control and inspect the state of the Performance-Monitoring Counters (PMCs) in the system.

The first argument, command, specifies the action to take. Valid commands are:

list
Display a list of performance counter events available on the system.
start name:option [name:option ...]
Start one or several counters. name specifies the name of the event to count; it must be taken from the list of available events. option specifies the source of the event; it must be a combination of u (userland) and k (kernel).
stop
Stop any performance counters that are currently running, and display the values of these counters.

src/sys/arch/x86/x86/pmc.c x86 implementation.

src/usr.bin/pmc/pmc.c pmc tool.

The following command prints the available counters.

# pmc list

The following command starts two counters. The former will count the 'l2cache-access' events that are triggered from userland, the latter will count the 'l1cache-access' events triggered from both userland and the kernel.

# pmc start l2cache-access:u l1cache-access:uk

Note that the two following commands are not exactly identical.

# pmc start l1cache-access:u l1cache-access:k
# pmc start l1cache-access:uk
The former will start two different counters that have a different source but track the same event. The latter will start one counter that tracks the event from all sources; it therefore does the sum of the two counters from the first command, but takes only one counter to do so.

For each PMC on each CPU, the value reported by the pmc tool is the number of events counted, encoded in a 64bit integer.

PMC support not compiled into the kernel
Performance-monitoring counter support has not been compiled into the kernel. It may be included using the option. See options(4) for details.

options(4)

The pmc command first appeared in NetBSD 1.6. It was revamped in NetBSD 8.0.

The pmc command currently only supports performance-monitoring counters on the i386 and amd64 architectures.

July 12, 2017 NetBSD-8.1