The Unofficial Linux Perf Events Web-Page

because the perf_events developers don't seem that excited about writing documentation

The nearly un-googleable "Perf Events" subsystem was merged into the Linux kernel in version 2.6.31 (originally called "Performance Counters for Linux" (PCL)). Unfortunately as of 2011 there is no good source of official information on this project. As I have to deal with perf_events for my work on the PAPI project, I have made this unofficial page to keep track of what I know about the project.

This page mostly deals with the travails needed to get a low-level library or utility interfacing with perf_events. It does not include documentation for the perf utility. For info on perf you should check its manpages, or else checkout a kernel tree from git and look in ./tools/perf/Documentation.
I've broken this page into sub-pages as it was getting a bit long:

Documentation ABI breakage Features and Processor Support Patches Validation Performace / Overhead Security Virtualization perf.data file format
Back to my projects page