ECSTATS(1)ECSTATS(1)NAMEecstats - report global event counter activity
SYNOPSISecstats [-aCDefr] [-s samples] [interval]
DESCRIPTIONecstats may be used on systems with R1x000 processors to interrogate the
global event counters maintained by IRIX using the underlying hardware
event counter mechanisms. The global event counters are maintained on a
system-wide basis, aggregated over all processes and for all user and
system mode execution.
Global event counters are enabled and disabled using the ecadmin(1)
command.
The options to ecstats are as follows;
-a Report absolute values for the event counters (the complement of
-r).
-C Enable full-screen and continuous update mode. Single character
keystroke commands have the effect of toggling the command line
options, i.e.
a change to reporting absolute counter values
e report only the enabled counters
f display both enabled and disabled counters
r change to reporting counter rates
q exit
^L redraw the display
-D Enable some diagnostic output, not useful with -C.
-e Display only those event counters that have been enabled - this is
the default.
-f Display both enabled and disabled event counters (the complement of
-e).
-r Display event rates - this is the default.
-s Report data for samples intervals and then exit. The default is to
run forever.
New information is reported each interval seconds. The default is 5
seconds.
For a particular processor implementation, the number of physical
hardware counters may be smaller than the number of event counters that
have been enabled. When this occurs, the IRIX kernel multiplexes the
physical hardware counters amongst the enabled event counters, and
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ECSTATS(1)ECSTATS(1)ecstats scales up the observed counts to reflect the level of
multiplexing. If this scaling has taken place, the reported counters may
be subject to some statistical sampling errors, and the values are shown
with a ``*'' annotation.
For systems with processors of mixed type (particularly R10000 and
R12000/R14000) some events have different semantics on different
processor types, refer to the -M and -T flags for ecadmin(1). If any
events in this category are enabled, then the values reported by ecstats
are shown with a ``?'' annotation.
CAVEAT
The underlying hardware event counters are a finite resource, to be
shared amongst multiple competing uses. ecstats is one such use that
requires the use of ecadmin(1) to enable at least one global event
counter.
Once any global event counters have been enabled with ecadmin(1), then
any future attempts to use either perfex(1) or the counter-based
SpeedShop profiling tools will be unsuccessful, until all global event
counters are released.
SEE ALSOecadmin(1), perfex(1), pminfo(1), speedshop(1) and r10k_counters(5).
The specifications for the R10000 event counters may be found at
http://www.sgi.com/processors/r10k/performance.html
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