perf rapl/powercap : powercap has more lenient permissions

From: Vince Weaver
Date: Wed Feb 24 2016 - 11:42:22 EST


Hello

so perf_event requires paranoid value of 0 to read the RAPL counters

perf stat -a -e power/energy-cores/ /bin/ls
Error:
You may not have permission to collect system-wide stats.

But I can use the new powercap driver to read the same values no problem:

cat /sys/devices/virtual/powercap/intel-rapl/intel-rapl:0/intel-rapl:0:0/energy_uj
121384969344


Is this expected? Should the powercap permissions be locked down more?


Just hitting this, as PAPI has at least 4 different interfaces to read the
RAPL power values (perf_event, /dev/msr, libmsr, powercap). Five if you
count that AMD exports their equivelent info via the hwmon interface.

Vince