What will be the exact code to get count of last level cache misses on Intel Kaby Lake architecture

Question

I read an interesting paper, entitled "A High-Resolution Side-Channel Attack on Last-Level Cache", and wanted to find out the index hash function for my own machine—i.e., Intel Core i7-7500U (Kaby Lake architecture)—following the leads from this work.

To reverse-engineer the hash function, the paper mentions the first step as:

 for (n=16; ; n++) 
 {
   // ignore any miss on first run
   for (fill=0; !fill; fill++) 
   {
     // set pmc to count LLC miss
     reset_pmc();
     for (a=0; a<n; a++)
       // set_count*line_size=2^19
       load(a*2^19);
   }

   // get the LLC miss count
   if (read_pmc()>0) 
   {
     min = n;
     break;
   }
 }

How can I code the reset_pmc() and read_pmc() in C++? From all that I read online so far, I think it requires inline assembly code, but I have no clue what instructions to use to get the LLC miss count. I would be obliged if someone can specify the code for these two steps.

I am running Ubuntu 16.04.1 (64-bit) on VMware workstation.

P.S.: I found mention of these LONGEST_LAT_CACHE.REFERENCES and LONGEST_LAT_CACHE.MISSES in Chapter-18 Volume 3B of the Intel Architectures Software Developer's Manual, but I do not know how to use them.

Answer 1

You can use perf as Cody suggested to measure the events from outside the code, but I suspect from your code sample that you need fine-grained, programmatic access to the performance counters.

To do that, you need to enable user-mode reading of the counters, and also have a way to program them. Since those are restricted operations, you need at least some help from the OS kernel to do that. Rolling your own solution is going to be pretty difficult, but luckily there are several existing solutions for Ubunty 16.04:

• Andi Kleen's jevents library, which among other things lets you read PMU events from user space. I haven't personally used this part of pmu-tools, but the stuff I have used has been high quality. It seems to use the existing perf_events syscalls for counter programming so and doesn't need a kernel model.
• The libpfc library is a from-scratch implementation of a kernel module and userland code that allows userland reading of the performance counters. I've used this and it works well. You install the kernel module which allows you to program the PMU, and then use the API exposed by libpfc to read the counters from userspace (the calls boil down to rdpmc instructions). It is the most accurate and precise way to read the counters, and it includes "overhead subtraction" functionality which can give you the true PMU counts for the measured region by subtracting out the events caused by the PMU read code itself. You need to pin to a single core for the counts to make sense, and you will get bogus results if your process is interrupted.
• Intel's open-sourced Processor Counter Monitor library. I haven't tried this on Linux, but I used its predecessor library, the very similarly named¹Performance Counter Monitor on Windows, and it worked. On Windows it needs a kernel driver, but on Linux it seems you can either use a drive or have it go through perf_events.
• Use the likwid library's Marker API functionality. Likwid has been around for a while and seems well supported. I have used likwid in the past, but only to measure whole processes in a matter similar to perf stat and not with the marker API. To use the marker API you still need to run your process as a child of the likwid measurement process, but you can read programmatically the counter values within your process, which is what you need (as I understand it). I'm not sure how likwid is setting up and reading the counters when the marker API is used.

So you've got a lot of options! I think all of them could work, but I can personally vouch for libpfc since I've used it myself for the same purpose on Ubuntu 16.04. The project is actively developed and probably the most accurate (least overhead) of the above. So I'd probably start with that one.

All of the solutions above should be able to work for Kaby Lake, since the functionality of each successive "Performance Monitoring Architecture" seems to generally be a superset of the prior one, and the API is generally preserved. In the case of libpfc, however, the author has restricted it to only support Haswell's architecture (PMA v3), but you just need to change one line of code locally to fix that.

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¹ Indeed, they are both commonly called by their acronym, PCM, and I suspect that the new project is simply the officially open sourced continuation of the old PCM project (which was also available in source form, but without a mechanism for community contribution).