Andi Kleen authored Feb 17, 2015 and Ingo Molnar committed Mar 27, 2015

On Broadwell INST_RETIRED.ALL cannot be used with any period
that doesn't have the lowest 6 bits cleared. And the period
should not be smaller than 128.

This is erratum BDM11 and BDM55:

  http://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/specification-updates/5th-gen-core-family-spec-update.pdf



BDM11: When using a period < 100; we may get incorrect PEBS/PMI
interrupts and/or an invalid counter state.
BDM55: When bit0-5 of the period are !0 we may get redundant PEBS
records on overflow.

Add a new callback to enforce this, and set it for Broadwell.

How does this handle the case when an app requests a specific
period with some of the bottom bits set?

Short answer:

Any useful instruction sampling period needs to be 4-6 orders
of magnitude larger than 128, as an PMI every 128 instructions
would instantly overwhelm the system and be throttled.
So the +-64 error from this is really small compared to the
period, much smaller than normal system jitter.

Long answer (by Peterz):

IFF we guarantee perf_event_attr::sample_period >= 128.

Suppose we start out with sample_period=192; then we'll set period_left
to 192, we'll end up with left = 128 (we truncate the lower bits). We
get an interrupt, find that period_left = 64 (>0 so we return 0 and
don't get an overflow handler), up that to 128. Then we trigger again,
at n=256. Then we find period_left = -64 (<=0 so we return 1 and do get
an overflow). We increment with sample_period so we get left = 128. We
fire again, at n=384, period_left = 0 (<=0 so we return 1 and get an
overflow). And on and on.

So while the individual interrupts are 'wrong' we get then with
interval=256,128 in exactly the right ratio to average out at 192. And
this works for everything >=128.

So the num_samples*fixed_period thing is still entirely correct +- 127,
which is good enough I'd say, as you already have that error anyhow.

So no need to 'fix' the tools, al we need to do is refuse to create
INST_RETIRED:ALL events with sample_period < 128.

Signed-off-by: Andi Kleen <ak@linux.intel.com>
[ Updated comments and changelog a bit. ]
Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra (Intel) <peterz@infradead.org>
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1424225886-18652-3-git-send-email-andi@firstfloor.org


Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>