perf: race with automatic rdpmc() disabling
From: Vince Weaver
Date: Mon Mar 13 2017 - 09:58:19 EST
Hello
I've been trying to track this issue down for a few days and haven't been
able to isolate it. So maybe someone who understands low-level perf mmap
reference counting can help here.
As you might recall, 7911d3f7af14a614617e38245fedf98a724e46a9
introduced automatic disabling of userspace rdpmc when no perf_events
were running.
I've run into a problem with PAPI when using rdpmc. If you have PAPI
measuring events in multiple pthread threads, sometimes (but not always)
the program will GPF because CR4/rdpmc gets turned off while events are
still active.
I've been trying to put together a reproducible test case but haven't been
able to manage. I have a PAPI test that will show the problem about
50% of the time but I can't seem to isolate the problem.
Any ideas?
If you really want to try to reproduce it, get the current git version of
PAPI
git clone https://bitbucket.org/icl/papi.git
edit src/components/perf_event/perf_event.c
so that #define PERF_USE_RDPMC 1
in src run ./configure , make
then run the ./ctests/zero_pthreads test a few times. It will GPF and I'm
relatively (though not entirely) sure it's not a PAPI issue.
The problem does go away if you set /sys/devices/cpu/rdpmc to 2
Vince