PAPI / perf_event on KNC

This page tells how to get PAPI and Linux perf_event working on Intel's MIC/KNC/Knight's Corner/Xeon Phi.

Upstream

Full support for the Knights Corner PMU (written by me) is included in the upcoming Linux 3.7 release. However, KNC isn't support by the rest of the kernel out of the box so you'll probably want to follow the below directions for patching Intel's kernel.

Patching Intel's MPSS

Intel provides a Manycore Platform Software Stack (MPSS) for the MIC. perf_event support is not included yet by default (though there's hope this will happen in the near future). Until then you have to patch and re-compile the kernel manually.

Patching MPSS Gold Update 1

Download the new packages and setup. This will be similar to that below, but I haven't personally tried it.
Use the following patch: perf.patch.txt

Patching MPSS Gold Initial Release

First download one of the KNC beta source trees from here
Make a directory called build and unpack gpl/package-full_src-k1om.tar.bz2 from the package you downloaded.
Untar gpl/package-cross-k1om.tar.bz2 into the same directory
Copy gpl/package-cross-k1om.tar.bz2 into the same directory
Go into the card/kernel directory and apply this patch: mic.patch11 (patch -p1 < mic.patch11)
Run intel-mic-gpl.sh build release. This takes a while, and uses a lot of disk space!
Copy card/kernel/arch/x86/boot/bzImage to uos.img
Copy uos.img to /lib/firmware/mic/
Reboot the MIC card, and check the dmesg for "Perf" messages to verify the setup.

Setting up PAPI

Get current PAPI git tree git clone https://icl.cs.utk.edu/git/papi.git
Set up k1om cross-compile. To do this, follow the directions above for building a kernel image.
Add build/usr/linux-k1om-4.7/bin or equivelent to your PATH so PAPI can find the cross-build utils.

You will need to configure PAPI as so:

./configure --with-arch=k1om --host=x86_64-k1om-linux --without-ffsll --with-walltimer=clock_realtime_hr --with-perf-events --with-tls=__thread --with-virtualtimer=cputime_id

run make CONFIG_PFMLIB_ARCH_X86=y
PAPI should now be built. If you did this in a location that is NFS mounted by your MIC card, just log in and run the PAPI tests to confirm things are working.

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