Wed, May 3, 2006

XCPUSTATE is a snapshot performance monitor. It was originally written by
Mark Moraes to watch the load distribution on the CPUs on an Silicon Graphics
Iris 4D/240. It has since been ported to a wide variety of multiprocessors and
uniprocessors.

On some systems (eg. Suns, Linux),  XCPUSTATE can monitor disk performance,
and on Suns running SunOS 4.x, it can monitor OMNI network coprocessor
performance.  It supports the RSTAT RPC protocol, and both tiled/stippled and
color/grayscale bars.

Native support for the following systems is included:

AIX 3.x and 4.x, BSD 4.3 and earlier, BSD 4.4 and derivitives
(FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD), OpenBSD 3.0+, BSDI, Gould NP1, SGI IRIX, MACH,
NCR SVR4, Solbourne OS/MP, SunOS 4.x, Solaris 2.x or later, USL SVR4, Digital
Ultrix, Cray UNICOS, Linux, Cygwin

If your system is not listed here, RSTAT RPC may still be used.

The latest version of xcpustate can be obtained via anonymous ftp from:
    ftp://ftp.cs.toronto.edu/pub/jdd/xcpustate
    ftp://ftp.x.org/contrib/utilities/

Installation Notes:

	If you have imake, edit the Imakefile, paying special attention
	to the DEFINES line.  Then generate the makefile using xmkmf and run
	"make all" to compile the application.

	If you do not have imake, copy Makefile.noimake to Makefile, and
	modify it for your system, paying special attention to the DEFS
	line.  

	For some but not all architectures, xcpustate must be installed 
	with read privileges on /dev/kmem or equivalent. This generally 
	requires that it be installed setgid kmem or setgid sys, or even 
	setuid root. If xcpustate cannot read the kernel, it will not be able
	to access the kernel variables it needs. However, xcpustate will
	still be able to use the RSTAT protocol.   This is not a problem
	for Solaris, Linux or Cygwin.

	If you have difficulty compiling the rstat* files, and if you
	have a functional rpcgen, you can regenerate them for your own
	architecture by doing a "make veryclean" before typing "make all".

Architecture-dependant notes:

	For SunOS 4.x, add -DOMNI to MACHDEFS in the Imakefile (or 
	Makefile.noimake) if you have and use OMNI NC400/NC600 network 
	co-processors and want to include support for them.

	For Solaris 2.x or later, xcpustate uses the kstat interface
	to access kernel data, and thus read access to /dev/kmem is not
	necessary.

	For AIX 4.x SMP support using Makefile.noimake, add -DSMP to
	MACHDEFS.

	For Linux and Cygwin, xcpustate uses /proc/stat, so read
	access to /dev/kmem is not necessary.  

	For old versions of Linux (2.0 kernels), to get separate
	bars per CPU, you will need to apply Jerome Forissie's
	per-cpu usage information patch for /proc/stat, from
	"http://www-isia.cma.fr/~forissie/smp_kernel_patch/index.html".
	If desired, you can add -DSHOWAVG to Imakefile or Makefile.noimake
	to show one more bar than the number of CPUS available; the first
	bar will be the average over all CPUs.

Porting Notes: 

	It is sufficient to write an s-<machine>.c for the desired system,
	and add it to s.c.  All system-dependent code is in the
	appropriate s-<machine>.c file.  Use one of the existing files
	as a template.

Regards,

John
--
John DiMarco <jdd@cs.toronto.edu>                         Office: SF3302B
IT Director                                               Phone: 416-978-5300
Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto     Fax:   416-946-5464
http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~jdd