WindowsPerf

WindowsPerf is a port of the popular Linux perf tool for performance analysis.

Learn more in this blog announcing the first release.

For installation instructions see the install guide .

Using WindowsPerf

For a list of all available options, enter:

    

        
        
            wperf -h
        
    

List available events

WindowsPerf uses Arm processor Performance Monitoring Unit (PMU) counters to generate its data. The available events that can be profiled will vary per target.

To generate a list of available events, use:

    

        
        
            wperf list
        
    

The output should be similar to:

    

        
        List of pre-defined events (to be used in -e)

        Alias Name              Raw Index  Event Type
        ==========              =========  ==========
        sw_incr                      0x00  [core PMU event]
        l1i_cache_refill             0x01  [core PMU event]
...

List of supported metrics (to be used in -m)

        Metric  Events
        ======  ======
        dcache  {l1d_cache,l1d_cache_refill,l2d_cache,l2d_cache_refill,inst_retired}
        dtlb    {l1d_tlb,l1d_tlb_refill,l2d_tlb,l2d_tlb_refill,inst_retired}
        icache  {l1i_cache,l1i_cache_refill,l2i_cache,l2i_cache_refill,inst_retired}
...

        
    

Generate sample profile

Specify the event to profile with -e. Groups of events, known as metrics can be specified with -m.

For example, generate a report for Core 0 (-c 0) for two seconds (-d 2) with:

    

        
        
            wperf stat -e cpu_cycles -m icache -c 0 -d 2
        
    

This will output a report similar to:

    

        
                counter value  event name        event idx  event note
        =============  ==========        =========  ==========
          649,973,325  cycle             fixed      e
          277,788,076  l1i_cache         0x14       g0,icache
            7,415,699  l1i_cache_refill  0x01       g0,icache
                    0  l2i_cache         0x27       g0,icache
                    0  l2i_cache_refill  0x28       g0,icache
          813,129,394  inst_retired      0x08       g0,icache
          649,973,325  cpu_cycles        0x11       e

        
    

Example use cases are provided in the WindowsPerf documentation .