Re: Performance Co-Pilot

[Mike Mason <mmlnx@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Todd,

Sorry for not responding sooner.  I'm just catching up with my email.

Comments below...

Davis, Todd C wrote:
> Mike,
>
>             I have started looking at SGI's Performance Co-Pilot for 
> possible use in the Carrier Grade Linux Enhancements, see 
> http://developer.osdl.org/projects/. I am somewhat concerned with the 
> lack of activity PCP is experiencing both from SGI and in the Linux 
> community. Red Hat has not picked up the project but SUSE apparently has 

I'm also concerned about the lack of activity, but I still think PCP has 
a role to play for customers.  PCP has no kernel components and, I 
assume, is of little interest to kernel developers so you won't see it 
mentioned in those forums.  On the other hand, I know from past 
experience that many customers require performance data collection tools 
like PCP.  I don't know of any similar projects for Linux right now, at 
least not anything with the same breadth of features.

As for why only SUSE has picked it up, the SGI folks will have to answer 
that one.  I think it's worth promoting to the other distributions.

> along with the only open source GUI available for PCP. From what few 
> hits search engines have found was the IBM patches that you have posted. 
> IBM does not list Performance Co-Pilot as a project but has these 
> patches available. How does IBM distribute PCP? Do you roll your own 
> RPM? Can one download a PCP tarball and/or RPMs form IBM?

Actually, for legal reasons, I don't think IBM distributes any projects 
where we aren't the maintainers.  The projects you see distributed on 
IBM's OSS site are those that we originated and/or are the maintainers. 
 PCP users have to get PCP from SGI's OSS site.

> My initial investigations into PCP today turned up some problems with 
> PCP on RedHat 7.3. The last release from SGI does not build an RPM on 
> RedHat 7.3 correctly. Also the man pages only work from the command line 
> but khelpcenter and man2html choke on the man pages from SGI. The source 
> builds and installs but some metrics don't appear to be correct. Does 

All fixable in the next release, I assume.  Which metrics don't appear 
to be correct?

> IBM or SGI have any test suites to validate the PCP utilities, daemons, 
> and programming interfaces?

IBM doesn't have any test suites for PCP, but I assume SGI does.

> Is there an active maintainer for PCP? Do you have any insight into 
> SGI's plans for PCP? They apparently GPL'ed the code in hopes of getting 
> Linux community participation that has not materialized. Is this the 
> reason why there is not any mailing list activity, new releases, or 
> announcements since December 2001?

There has been a little mailing list activity since December, but last I 
checked the archive on SGI's site isn't up-to-date.

Mike Mason
Software Engineer
IBM Linux Technology Center, RAS Group
Beaverton, Oregon
phone: (503) 578-4123   tie line: 775-4123
mmlnx@xxxxxxxxxx        fax:  (503) 578-3228