Linux Kernel Gets Patch To Support AMD Zen's Performance Monitoring Unit Events

SUSE developer Martin Liška has published a patch wiring in support for AMD PMU events on the AMD Family 17h "Zen" processors.

This is for recognizing the events generated by the CPU's performance monitoring unit (PMU) within the Linux's "perf" performance monitoring subsystem.

Those PMU events pertain to the Ryzen/EPYC processors cache/core/FP/memory and other characteristics for tracking things like cache misses, retired instructions, reload requests, etc. This PMU perf support is based upon documentation AMD had published last year when Zen CPUs began shipping.

The patch for now can be found on the mailing list but should soon be on its way to a kernel near you for those of you wanting to do perf-based profiling on Zen hardware.