RE: Simultaneous access to same CPU/counter across processes crashes hwpmc (TSC and other classes)

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> -----Original Message-----
> From: Adrian Chadd <[email protected]>
> Sent: Saturday, August 22, 2026 4:04 PM
> To: Nascimento, Anderson Eduardo
> <[email protected]>
> Cc: [email protected]
> Subject: Re: Simultaneous access to same CPU/counter across processes
> crashes hwpmc (TSC and other classes)
>
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> On Wed, 19 Aug 2026 at 07:18, Nascimento, Anderson Eduardo
> <[email protected]> wrote:
> >
> > Public
> >
> > Hello all,
> >
> > I am working on developing a new class of PMCs for the hwpmc subsystem
> and I ran into a kernel crash while testing my implementation. I believe I have
> identified the reason the crash happens, and I could try to fix it on the affected
> classes, but so far it's still not clear to me what model the hwpmc subsystem
> intends to enforce. Should simultaneous access to the same CPU and counter
> by different processes be allowed?
>
> The initial design goals and list from the original author (jkoshy@) is still
> available on the wiki, eg see https://wiki.freebsd.org/PmcTools/Features .
>
> So yes, one of the design goals of hwpmc versus what was available in Linux at
> the time (oprofile) was that counters are virtualised both for context switching
> between processes /and/ multiple processes accessing the same counters on a
> given CPU (and as part of this, handling context switching appropriately.)
>
> It's what made it much nicer to use back when it was introduced versus
> oprofile. (of course, oprofiles tooling 'just worked' versus pmc..)
>
>

Hello Adrian,

This adds important context. I had checked other pages related to PMC on the Wiki, but I missed that one. Thanks for sharing this.

>
> -adrian