Authors: Manuel Selva, Harald Servat

This project contains several C independent programs and some common libraries for Linux used to illustrate some architectural details of the hardware executing the programs.

To compile programs, just run make from the project's root directory.

The different programs are:

• cache_tests: Determine through timing memory accesses cache levels and sizes.

• mem_alloc: Library used by other programs to allocate and fill memory ready for pointer chasing. Each memroy "cell" points to another memory cell in the memory region. The library provide sequential memory filling and pseudo-random memory filling.

• pebs_tests: For Intel Nehalem processors only. Benchmark illustrating the PEBS (Precise Event Based Sampling) load latency feature provied by Intel Nehalem's PMU (Performance Monitoring Unit) hardware.

• perf_event_open_tests: Simple example of how using the Linux perf_event_open system call providing an abstraction of underlying PMU.