Profiling events
perf supports different kinds profiling events,
especially statistical profiling and
performance monitoring.
At the most basic end, a timer (clock event)
can used to periodically sample the PC,
however profiling can be triggered by other
hardware events such as I$ or D$ miss,
branch instruction, etc. perf also can rely on
hardware breakpoint for profiling.
perf also supports software events for kernel
software event statistics, like context
switches counting, ftrace tracepoints, etc.
perf list command is used to quickly
check what events are supported in your
system:
# perf list
cache-misses [Hardware event]
[...]
cpu-clock [Software event]
context-switches OR cs [Software event]
[...]
mem:<addr>[/len][:access] [Hardware breakpoint]
9p:9p_client_req [Tracepoint event]
[...]
