About this Install Guide

This guide is intended to get you up and running with this tool quickly with the most common settings. For a thorough review of all options, refer to the official documentation.

WindowsPerf is an open-source command line tool for performance analysis on Windows on Arm devices.

WindowsPerf consists of a kernel-mode driver and a user-space command-line tool. The command-line tool is modeled after the Linux perf command.

WindowsPerf includes a counting model for counting events such as cycles, instructions, and cache events and a sampling model to understand how frequently events occur.

Virtual Machines

WindowsPerf cannot be used on virtual machines, such as cloud instances.

Visual Studio and the Windows Driver Kit (WDK)

WindowsPerf relies on dll files installed with Visual Studio (Community Edition or higher) and (optionally) installers from the Windows Driver Kit extension.

Download the Windows Driver Kit (WDK) explains the WDK installation process.

See also the Visual Studio for Windows on Arm install guide .

Download WindowsPerf

The latest release package windowsperf-bin-<version>.zip can be downloaded from the Linaro GitLab repository:

    

        
        
            https://gitlab.com/Linaro/WindowsPerf/windowsperf/-/releases
        
    

To download directly from command prompt, use:

    

        
        
            mkdir windowsperf-bin-3.2.1
cd windowsperf-bin-3.2.1
curl https://gitlab.com/api/v4/projects/40381146/packages/generic/windowsperf/3.2.1/windowsperf-bin-3.2.1.zip --output windowsperf-bin-3.2.1.zip
        
    

Unzip the package:

    

        
        
            tar -xmf windowsperf-bin-3.2.1.zip
        
    

Install wperf driver

You can install the kernel driver using either the Visual Studio devcon utility or the supplied installer .

Note

You must install the driver as Administrator.

Open a Windows Command Prompt terminal with Run as administrator enabled.

Navigate to the windowsperf-bin-<version> directory.

    

        
        
            cd windowsperf-bin-3.2.1
        
    

Install with devcon

Navigate into the wperf-driver folder, and use devcon to install the driver:

    

        
        
            cd wperf-driver
devcon install wperf-driver.inf Root\WPERFDRIVER
        
    

You will see output similar to:

    

        
        Device node created. Install is complete when drivers are installed...
Updating drivers for Root\WPERFDRIVER from <path>\wperf-driver.inf.
Drivers installed successfully.

        
    

Install with wperf-devgen

Copy the wperf-devgen.exe executable to the wperf-driver folder.

    

        
        
            copy wperf-devgen.exe wperf-driver\
        
    

Navigate to the wperf-driver folder and run the installer:

    

        
        
            cd wperf-driver
wperf-devgen install
        
    

You will see output similar to:

    

        
        Executing command: install.
Install requested.
Waiting for device creation...
Device installed successfully.
Trying to install driver...
Success installing driver.

        
    

Verify install

You can check everything is working by running the wperf executable.

Note

Once the above driver is installed, you can use wperf without Administrator privileges.

For example:

    

        
        
            cd ..
wperf --version
        
    

You should see output similar to:

    

        
        Component     Version  GitVer
=========     =======  ======
wperf         3.2.1    c831cfc2
wperf-driver  3.2.1    c831cfc2

        
    

Uninstall wperf driver

You can uninstall (aka “remove”) the kernel driver using either the Visual Studio devcon utility or the supplied installer .

Note

You must uninstall the driver as Administrator.

Uninstall with devcon

Below command removes the device from the device tree and deletes the device stack for the device. As a result of these actions, child devices are removed from the device tree and the drivers that support the device are unloaded. See DevCon Remove article for more details.

    

        
        
            devcon remove wperf-driver.inf Root\WPERFDRIVER
        
    

You should see output similar to:

    

        
        ROOT\SYSTEM\0001                                            : Removed
1 device(s) were removed.

        
    

Uninstall with wperf-devgen

    

        
        
            wperf-devgen uninstall
        
    

You should see output similar to:

    

        
        
            Executing command: uninstall.
Uninstall requested.
Waiting for device creation...
Device uninstalled successfully.
Trying to remove driver <path>\wperf-driver.inf.
Driver removed successfully.
        
    

Further reading

Announcing WindowsPerf: Open-source performance analysis tool for Windows on Arm


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