Guest OS to use Hardware Performance Counters

[Taral]

Hi All,

Does anyone know if there is any setting that can be done to allows the guest OS to use hardware performance counters directly. For example in linux using perf utility. Basically i want CPU perf counters to be accessed directly in the VM guest (Linux).

[Ramshankar]

We don't yet implement the performance counter MSRs correctly (i.e. our RDPMC implementation just returns zeros) but might we might handle a few of them that makes sense. And no, there is no simple "Setting" which will make this work. Implementing them in a somewhat sensible manner even though a few of them makes no sense in a VM requires a lot of code and it is work in progress.

[Taral]

Thanks RamShankar for quick response

[mancha]

Hello Ramshankar et al.

First of all, many thanks for all your great work with VirtualBox!

It's been a bit since this thread was started and I was wondering if there was any news regarding progress with virtualizing CPU counters. As long as I'm asking, I was also curious if there were plans to add support for newer instructions (e.g. sse4).

Thanks.

--mancha

[Perryg]

Can't answer the first question but the second has been available as experimental since 4.3.8
http://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch09.h ... assthrough

[mancha]

Can't answer the first question but the second has been available as experimental since 4.3.8

Hi. Thanks for the link! Will test sse4 support while I wait for word from Oracle regarding CPU perf virtualization.