Simple Processor Trace Announced For Broadwell & Skylake CPUs

Andi Kleen of Intel announced today the release of Simple-PT, a simple Processor Trace implementation for Linux.

Describing Simple-PT, Andi wrote in today's announcement of the new tool, "Modern Intel Core CPUs (5th and 6th generation) have a Intel Processor Trace (PT) feature to trace branch execution with low overhead. This is useful for performance analysis and debugging. simple-pt is a simple standalone driver and decoder tool to implement PT on Linux." The PT functionality is found in hardware for Broadwell (5th Gen Core) and Skylake (6th Gen Core).

Simple-PT is an alternative to the Processor Trace support found in the kernel's subsystem as of Linux 4.1. Simple-PT is meant to be simple (hence its name), standalone, easy to modify, is BSD licensed, and offers other benefits.

More details via the kernel mailing list. Those wishing to learn more about Intel PT itself can see these slides.