Perf for Windows on Arm (WindowsPerf)

About this Install Guide

Reading time:	15 min
Last updated:	5 Sep 2023

Reading time:

15 min

Last updated:

5 Sep 2023

Author:	Arm
Official docs:	View

Author:

Arm

Official docs:

View

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.

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:

    

        
        
            curl https://gitlab.com/api/v4/projects/40381146/packages/generic/windowsperf/2.5.1/windowsperf-bin-2.5.1.zip --output windowsperf-bin-2.5.1.zip

Unzip the package to your preferred location.

    

        
        
            tar -xmf windowsperf-bin-2.5.1.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-2.5.1

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
=========     =======
wperf         2.5.1
wperf-driver  2.5.1