X86 performance monitoring

[Frank Cox <theatre sasktel net>]

My brother just sent me this inquiry and I thought I would ask here to see if
any of you lot know anything about this before I send him a reply.

Just checking whether you know anything about the various packages
I could use to monitor performance of code running on X86 processors.
I want to measure things like:
   - instructions executed, in a block of code (ie., from here to there)
   - cache misses (i-cache, d-cache, L1, L2, etc)
   - processor cycles
   - SSE4 instructions executed
   - ... and so on.

There appear to be at least a few packages which expose the
MSR functionality in varioius ways (e.g., the perfctr package).
I wondered if you knew which package would be considered
the 'best'.

One unpleasant aspect of the perfctr package is that it appears
that I need to apply patches to the kernel, then rebuild;
this would appear to increase the complexity of system maintenance
(can't just update and have everything up).

-- 
MELVILLE THEATRE ~ Melville Sask ~ http://www.melvilletheatre.com