Setting up perf to monitor hardware events

Question

I'm trying to profile a program using perf stat. Unfortunately, I get <not supported> for all the hardware events. How do I set things up so that it supports hardware events?

Do I need to install something else or change some setting? I'm running Ubuntu 12.04.

Answer 1

"not supported" usually means your hardware does not support it. If there was support in hardware is available but support in kernel is missing it usually says "not counted".

If you run "perf record" and "perf report" it might give you more detailed error.

Are you running perf on some virtual machine?