Clearer labelling from oprofile

Question

I'm using the ocount tool from the oprofile suite to count three different HW performance counters:

ocount --events=rtm_retired:commit,rtm_retired:start,rtm_retired:aborted programA

The problem is that because the three counters share a prefix, the output is irksomely ambiguous.

Event counts (actual) for programA:
    Event              Count                    % time counted
    rtm_retired        908                      100.00
    rtm_retired        908                      100.00
    rtm_retired        0                        100.00

The ordering is correct given the command line, but if I'm dumping all this stuff into files as I do experiments with other counters, it's possible to lose track of what counter is what.

Looking at the ocount manpage, I can't seem to figure out a way to force it give the full event name.

Added:

Looking at the sources, I'm not actually sure this is possible, as the three events above are just masks on the same counter, and the count-printing section of the sources seems to only deal with event names, not mask names.

Alas (but would love to be proven wrong).

Answer 1

If changing the source code for ocount isn't an option, you can always modify the output afterwards.

Try piping the output through this perl one liner:

ocount --events=rtm_retired:commit,rtm_retired:start,rtm_retired:aborted programA | \
perl -n -e ' @suffix = ("commit", "start", "aborted"); if ( m/rtm_retired/ ) { $count++; s/rtm_retired/rtm_retired:$suffix[$count-1]/;  } print $_;'

This should work as long as you make sure to keep track of the order of counters you pass to ocount and match the @suffix array to it.