The vmstat utility provides a good low-overhead view of system performance. Since vmstat is such a low-overhead tool, it is practical to have it running even on heavily loaded servers when it is needed to monitor the system’s health.

Run vmstat on your machine with a 1 second delay between updates. Notice the CPU utilisation (info about the output columns here).

In another terminal, use the stress command to start N CPU workers, where N is the number of cores on your system. Do not pass the number directly. Instead, use command substitution.

Note: if you are trying to solve the lab on fep and you don't have stress installed, try cloning and compiling stress-ng.

Let us look at how vmstat works under the hood. We can assume that all these statistics (memory, swap, etc.) can not be normally gathered in userspace. So how does vmstat get these values from the kernel? Or rather, how does any process interact with the kernel? Most obvious answer: system calls.

$ strace vmstat

“All well and good. But what am I looking at?”

What you should be looking at are the system calls after the two writes that display the output header (hint: it has to do with /proc/ file system). So, what are these files that vmstat opens?

$ file /proc/meminfo
$ cat /proc/meminfo
 
$ man 5 proc

The manual should contain enough information about what these kernel interfaces can provide. However, if you are interested in how the kernel generates the statistics in /proc/meminfo (for example), a good place to start would be meminfo.c (but first, SO2 wiki).

Write a one-liner that uses vmstat to report complete disk statistics and sort the output in descending order based on total reads column.

Try to run the script while passing 1000 as a command line argument. Why does it crash?

Luckily, python allows you to both retrieve the current recursion limit and set a new value for it. Increase the recursion limit so that the process will never crash, regardless of input (assume that it still has a reasonable upper bound).

Run the script again, this time passing 10000. Use mpstat to monitor the load on each individual CPU at 1s intervals. The one with close to 100% load will be the one running our script. Note that the process might be passed around from one core to another.

Stop the process. Use stress to create N-1 CPU workers, where N is the number of cores on your system. Use taskset to set the CPU affinity of the N-1 workers to CPUs 1-(N-1) and then run the script again. You should notice that the process is scheduled on cpu0.

Note: to get the best performance when running a process, make sure that it stays on the same core for as long as possible. Don't let the scheduler decide this for you, if you can help it. Allowing it to bounce your process between cores can drastically impact the efficient use of the cache and the TLB. This holds especially true when you are working with servers rather than your personal PCs. While the problem may not manifest on a system with only 4 cores, you can't guarantee that it also won't manifest on one with 40 cores. When running several experiments in parallel, aim for something like this:

Write a bash command that binds CPU stress workers on your odd-numbered cores (i.e.: 1,3,5,…). The list of cores and the number of stress workers must NOT be hardcoded, but constructed based on nproc (or whatever else you fancy).
In your submission, include both the bash command and a mpstat capture to prove that the command is working.

The zip command is used for compression and file packaging under Linux/Unix operating system. It provides 10 levels of compression, where:

• level 0 : provides no compression, only packaging
• level 6 : used as default compression level
• level 9 : provides maximum compression

$ zip -5 file.zip file.txt

Write a script to measure the compression rate and the time required for each level. You have a few large files in the code skeleton but feel free to add more. If you do add new files, make sure that they are not random data!

Generate a plot illustrating the compression rate, size decrease, etc. as a function of zip compression level. Make sure that your plot is understandable (i.e., has labels, a legend, etc.) Make sure to average multiple measurements for each compression level.

A significant portion of the system statistics that can be generated involve hardware counters. As the name implies, these are special registers that count the number of occurrences of specific events in the CPU. These counters are implemented through Model Specific Registers (MSR), control registers used by developers for debugging, tracing, monitoring, etc. Since these registers may be subject to changes from one iteration of a microarchitecture to the next, we will need to consult chapters 18 and 19 from Intel 64 and IA-32 Architectures Developer's Manual: Vol. 3B.

The instructions that are used to interact with these counters are RDMSR, WRMSR and RDPMC. Normally, these are considered privileged instructions (that can be executed only in ring0, aka. kernel space). As a result, acquiring this information from ring3 (user space) requires a context switch into ring0, which we all know to be a costly operation. The objective of this exercise is to prove that this is not necessarily the case and that it is possible to configure and examine these counters from ring3 in as few as a couple of clock cycles.

Before getting started, one thing to note is that there are two types of performance counters:

1. Fixed Function Counters
   • each can monitor a single, distinct and predetermined event (burned in hardware)
   • are configured a bit differently than the other type
   • are not of interest to us in this laboratory
2. General Purpose Counters
   • can be configured to monitor a specific event from a list of over 200 (see chapters 19.1 and 19.2)

Here is an overview of the following five tasks:

• Task A: check the version ID of your CPU to determine what it's capable of monitoring.
• Task B: set a certain bit in CR4 to enable ring3 usage of the RDPMC instruction.
• Task C: use some ring3 tools to enable the hardware counters.
• Task D: start counting L2 cache misses.
• Task E: use RDPMC to measure the cache misses for a familiar program.

First of all, we need to know what we are working with. Namely, the microarchitecture version ID and the number of counters per core. To this end, we will use cpuid (basically a wrapper over the CPUID instruction.) All the information that we need will be contained in the 0AH leaf (might want to get the raw output of cpuid):

• CPUID.0AH:EAX[15:8] : number of general purpose counters
• CPUID.0AH:EAX[7:0] : version ID
• CPUID.0AH:EDX[7:0] : number of fixed function counters

Note: the first two columns of the output represent the EAX and ECX registers used when calling CPUID. If the most significant bit in EAX is 1 (i.e.: starts with 0x8) the output is for extended options. ECX is a relatively new addition. So when looking for the 0AH leaf, search for a line starting with 0x0000000a. The register contents following ':' represent the output of the instruction.

Point out to your assistant which is which in the cpuid output.

Due to security considerations, reading the Performance Monitor Counters from userspace is normally not allowed. This is enforced at a hardware level via the Performance-Monitor Counter Enable bit in CR4.

Under normal circumstances, modifying Control Registers from userspace is not possible and you would have to write a kernel module for this. However, the perf_event_open() man page documents a sysfs interface (i.e., /sys/bus/event_source/devices/cpu/rdpmc) that does this for us.

Use the sysfs interface to revert the RDPMC access behavior to the pre-4.0 version.

The IA32_PERF_GLOBAL_CTRL (0x38f) MSR is an addition from version 2 that allows enabling / disabling multiple counters with a single WRMSR instruction. What happens, in layman terms, is that the CPU performs an AND between each EANBLE bit in this register and its counterpart in the counter's original configuration register from version 1 (which we will deal with in the next task.) If the result is 1, the counter begins to register the programmed event every clock cycle. Normally, all these bits should be set by default during the booting process but it never hurts to check. Also, note that this register exists for each logical core.

If for CR4 we had to write a kernel module, for MSRs we have user space tools that take care of this for us (rdmsr and wrmsr) by interacting with a driver called msr (install msr-tools if it's missing from your system.) But first, we must load this driver.

$ lsmod | grep msr
$ sudo modprobe msr
$ lsmod | grep msr
    msr                    16384  0

Next, let us read the value in the IA32_PERF_GLOBAL_CTRL register. If the result differs from what you see in the snippet below, overwrite the value (the -a flag specifies that we want the command to run on each individual logical core).

$ sudo rdmsr -a 0x38f
    70000000f
$ sudo wrmsr -a 0x38f 0x70000000f

The IA32_PERFEVENTSELx are MSRs from version 1 that are used to configure the monitored event of a certain counter, its enabled state and a few other things. We will not go into detail and instead only mention the fields that interest us right now (you can read about the rest in the Intel manual.) Note that the x in the MSR's name stands for the counter number. If we have 4 counters, it takes values in the 0:3 range. The one that we will configure is IA32_PERFEVENTSEL0 (0x186). If you want to configure more than one counter, note that they have consecutive register number (i.e. 0x187, 0x188, etc.).

As for the register flags, those that are not mentioned in the following list should be left cleared:

• EN (enable flag) = 1 starts the counter
• USR (user mode flag) = 1 monitors only ring3 events
• UMASK (unit mask) = ?? depends on the monitored event (see chapter 19.2)
• EVSEL (event select) = ?? depends on the monitored event (see chapter 19.2)

Before actually writing in this register, we should verify that no one is currently using it. If this is indeed the case, we might also want to clear IA32_PMC0 (0xc1). PMC0 is the actual counter that is associated to PERFEVENTSEL0.

$ sudo rdmsr -a 0x186
    0
$ sudo wrmsr -a 0xc1 0x00
$ sudo wrmsr -a 0x186 0x41????

For the next (and final task) we are going to monitor the number of L2 cache misses. Look for the L2_RQSTS.MISS event in table 19-3 or 19-11 (depending on CPU version id) in the Intel manual and set the last two bytes (the unit mask and event select) accordingly. If the operation is successful and the counters have started, you should start seeing non-zero values in the PMC0 register, increasing in subsequent reads.

As of now, we should be able to modify the CR4 register with the kernel module, enable all counters in the IA32_PERF_GLOBAL_CTRL across all cores and start an L2 cache miss counter again, across all cores. What remains is putting everything into practice.

Take mat_mul.c. This program may be familiar from an ASC laboratory but, in case it isn't, the gist of it is that when using the naive matrix multiplication algorithm (O(n^3)), the frequency with which each iterator varies can wildly affect the performance of the program. The reason behind this is (in)efficient use of the CPU cache. Take a look at the following snippet from the source and keep in mind that each matrix buffer is a continuous area in memory.

for (uint32_t i=0; i<N; ++i)             /* line   */
    for (uint32_t j=0; j<N; ++j)         /* column */
        for (uint32_t k=0; k<N; ++k)
            r[i*N + j] += m1[i*N + k] * m2[k*N + j];

What is the problem here? The problem is that i and k are multiplied with a large number N when updating a certain element. Thus, fast variations in these two indices will cause huge strides in accessed memory areas (larger than a cache line) and will cause unnecessary cache misses. So what are the best and worst configurations for the three fors? The best: i, k j. The worst: j, k, i. As we can see, the configurations that we will monitor in mat_mul.c do not coincide with the aforementioned two (so… not great, not terrible.) Even so, the difference in execution time and number of cache misses will still be significant.

Which brings us to the task at hand: using the RDPMC instruction, calculate the number of L2 cache misses for each of the two multiplications without performing any context switches (hint: look at gcc extended asm and the following macro from mat_mul.c).

#define rdpmc(ecx, eax, edx)    \
    asm volatile (              \
        "rdpmc"                 \
        : "=a"(eax),            \
          "=d"(edx)             \
        : "c"(ecx))

A word of caution: remember that each logical core has its own PMC0 counter, so make sure to use taskset in order to set the CPU affinity of the process. If you don't the process may be passed around different cores and the counter value becomes unreliable.

$ taskset 0x01 ./mat_mul 1024

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