Specifications

April 2012 v1 AMD Opteron™ 6200 Linux Tuning Guide
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6.0 Useful Tools
This section lists some tools you may find helpful when analyzing performance and measuring power states.
• CodeAnalyst
- Use CodeAnalyst for application profiling. For details, see http://developer.amd.com/tools/CodeAnalyst/
codeanalystlinux.
• PAPI
- Performance Application Programming Interface (PAPI) enables a host of other university performance
tools using performance counters. The document defining the performance counters is the Bios and Kernel
Developer’s Guide (BKDG) for the specific CPU family. The BKDG is located at http://developer.amd.com.
• cpufreq-utils
- A handy public utility for monitoring CPUs and can be found at: http://rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/search.
php?query=cpufrequtils.
- The cpufreq-aperf tool displays the current speed of the CPUs and shows if and when they boost.
- Instructions for using this tool are located at: http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/How_to_use_cpufrequtils.
• turbostat
- reports processor topology, frequency, and idle power state statistics on modern X86 processors. Either
command is forked and statistics are printed upon its completion, or statistics are printed periodically.
- requires that the processor support an “invariant” TSC, plus the APERF and MPERF MSRs. turbostat will
report idle CPU power state residency on processors that additionally support C-state residency counters.
- The source code is located at: http://lxr.free-electrons.com/source/tools/power/x86/turbostat/turbostat.c.
• PowerTOP
- PowerTOP is a software utility designed to measure, explain, and minimize a computer’s electrical
power consumption. It was released in 2007 under the GPLv2 license. It works for Intel, AMD, ARM, and
UltraSPARC processors.
- PowerTOP analyzes the programs, device drivers, and kernel options running on a computer based on the
Linux and Solaris operating systems and estimates the power consumption resulting from their use. This
information can be used to pinpoint software that results in excessive power use.
- PowerTOP’s minimum kernel requirement is now Linux version 2.6.36, which includes the infrastructure that
is needed for performance; some of the features even require kernel version 2.6.37.
- For all PowerTOP information, see:
http://www.h-online.com/open/features/Powertop-2-0-saving-power-under-Linux-1257057.html.