Itkovian.net

Since a few years, there is quite good support for using performance counters on Linux machines. Examples are OProfile (which has been included in the kernel since 2.6, I think), Perfctr, and Perfmon (not to be confused with the other Perfmon, which is a SNMP based performance monitoring tool). I think Perfmon is destined to make it to the kernel source tree as well, or so I've heard. Yet, I have been using Perfctr since I started my research, so this post is only about that tool.

There has been talk on the Perfctr mailing list (which gets hopelessly spammed these days) for including support for multi-threaded processes, but thus far I've seen nothing that does what I want. So, without further ado, here's how to patch your kernel to support multi-threaded applications.