Andi Kleen authored Dec 04, 2015 and Ingo Molnar committed Jan 06, 2016

Add a new 'three-p' precise level, that uses INST_RETIRED.PREC_DIST as
base. The basic mechanism of abusing the inverse cmask to get all
cycles works the same as before.

PREC_DIST is available on Sandy Bridge or later. It had some problems
on Sandy Bridge, so we only use it on IvyBridge and later. I tested it
on Broadwell and Skylake.

PREC_DIST has special support for avoiding shadow effects, which can
give better results compare to UOPS_RETIRED. The drawback is that
PREC_DIST can only schedule on counter 1, but that is ok for cycle
sampling, as there is normally no need to do multiple cycle sampling
runs in parallel. It is still possible to run perf top in parallel, as
that doesn't use precise mode. Also of course the multiplexing can
still allow parallel operation.

:pp stays with the previous event.

Example:

Sample a loop with 10 sqrt with old cycles:pp

	  0.14 │10:   sqrtps %xmm1,%xmm0     <--------------
	  9.13 │      sqrtps %xmm1,%xmm0
	 11.58 │      sqrtps %xmm1,%xmm0
	 11.51 │      sqrtps %xmm1,%xmm0
	  6.27 │      sqrtps %xmm1,%xmm0
	 10.38 │      sqrtps %xmm1,%xmm0
	 12.20 │      sqrtps %xmm1,%xmm0
	 12.74 │      sqrtps %xmm1,%xmm0
	  5.40 │      sqrtps %xmm1,%xmm0
	 10.14 │      sqrtps %xmm1,%xmm0
	 10.51 │    ↑ jmp    10

We expect all 10 sqrt to get roughly the sample number of samples.

But you can see that the instruction directly after the JMP is
systematically underestimated in the result, due to sampling shadow
effects.

With the new PREC_DIST based sampling this problem is gone and all
instructions show up roughly evenly:

	  9.51 │10:   sqrtps %xmm1,%xmm0
	 11.74 │      sqrtps %xmm1,%xmm0
	 11.84 │      sqrtps %xmm1,%xmm0
	  6.05 │      sqrtps %xmm1,%xmm0
	 10.46 │      sqrtps %xmm1,%xmm0
	 12.25 │      sqrtps %xmm1,%xmm0
	 12.18 │      sqrtps %xmm1,%xmm0
	  5.26 │      sqrtps %xmm1,%xmm0
	 10.13 │      sqrtps %xmm1,%xmm0
	 10.43 │      sqrtps %xmm1,%xmm0
	  0.16 │    ↑ jmp    10

Even with PREC_DIST there is still sampling skid and the result is not
completely even, but systematic shadow effects are significantly
reduced.

The improvements are mainly expected to make a difference in high IPC
code. With low IPC it should be similar.

Signed-off-by: Andi Kleen <ak@linux.intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra (Intel) <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
Cc: Jiri Olsa <jolsa@redhat.com>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: Stephane Eranian <eranian@google.com>
Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Cc: Vince Weaver <vincent.weaver@maine.edu>
Cc: hpa@zytor.com
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1448929689-13771-2-git-send-email-andi@firstfloor.org


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