re-enable Nehalem raw Offcore-Events support

From: Vince Weaver
Date: Fri Apr 29 2011 - 11:06:15 EST


Hello Linus

can you revert the commit b52c55c6a25e4515b5e075a989ff346fc251ed09

This removed functionality from perf_events that allowed raw event access
for OFFCORE_EVENTS type events on Nehalem and Westmere cpus.

To be fair, this is not technically a regression as the feature was only
(finally!) added in the 2.6.39 merge window. However this is a useful
feature and many tools (including the PAPI performance counter library
that I work on) had added support for it in anticipation of the 2.6.39
release.

Ingo's reasons for removing the feature seem to boil down to
1. "perf" doesn't use the functionality, and any other userspace
program that uses the perf_events syscalls don't matter
2. Users are too stupid to use the raw functionality properly;
we should only allow a kernel-developer-approved small subset
of the features provided by the CPU as described in the intel
developers manuals.

#2 seems like a gross misinterpretation of the whole "Linux gives you
enough rope to shoot yourself in the foot" policy from days passed, but
maybe things have moved on.

Thanks,

Vince
vweaver1@xxxxxxxxxxxx
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