HP ProLiant Server Power Management for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.x
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Figure 9: Firmware bug symptom on a ProLiant DL360e Gen8 server
This firmware bug message does not impact the perf performance counter subsystem because the subsystem is
executed continuously (as you can see by the message “Intel PMU driver.” in Figure 9), which means the
subsystem still works properly. To support the performance monitoring functionality, the subsystem uses the general-
purpose performance counters instead of the fixed-function performance counters. This approach avoids the MSR
conflict. The perf utility in RHEL 6.x provides performance monitoring by selecting the monitored events. For details
about performance monitoring events, see the Intel specification identified previously.
Example 3 shows an example of output from the perf utility. The command in the example specifies three events to be
monitored: UnHalted Core Cycles (r003c), UnHalted Reference Cycles (r013c), and Instruction retired (r00c0). The
example proves that the perf subsystem still works correctly even if BIOS occupied the fixed-function performance
counters. In this example, the stress
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utility is used to make the processor as busy as possible.
Example 3: Output from perf utility
# perf stat -e r003c -e r013c -e r00c0 stress --cpu 50 --timeout 120s
stress: info: [5693] dispatching hogs: 50 cpu, 0 io, 0 vm, 0 hdd
stress: info: [5693] successful run completed in 120s
Performance counter stats for 'stress --cpu 50 --timeout 120s':
2,715,777,736,549 r003c
142,982,564,816 r013c
3,031,663,572,695 r00c0
120.004665335 seconds time elapsed
If the customer is still concerned about the fixed-function performance counters being occupied by BIOS, the customer
can disable the “Processor Power and Utilization Monitoring” option in RBSU by following these steps (the GUI is shown
in Figure 10):
1. Press CTRL-A.
2. Select Service Options.
3. Disable the Processor Power and Utilization Monitoring option.
4. Reboot the system.
5. After rebooting, the firmware bug message will no longer appear.
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Linux-based workload generator – stress, http://weather.ou.edu/~apw/projects/stress/