First Beta of Release 1.0

I am pleased to announce the first beta of the intitial release of likwid.

There was a complete rewrite of the perfmon module. Many problems and bugs were fixed.

New features are:

* Full support of uncore events on Intel Nehalem

* Much improved output for likwid-perfCtr

* New flexible marker API to measure multiple named code regions

* Improved performance groups (still some work to do)

The multiplex feature, which allows to measure many events in one run is delayed

for the next major release.

Stay tuned and give this beta a try. Of course any feedback is appriciated.

Secure string handling in C

Everyone programming C knows that string support in C is really painful and potentially error-prone. I really wonder that they did not fix this issue. It is known for a while that string handling in C causes a lot of security issues and bugs.

As likwid reads and writes on the msr device files security is an issue. Therefore I switched now from raw C strings to bstrlib. bstrlib is a C library (there is also a C++ wrapper) implementing a string implementation with memory management and a much improved functionality. While it is a very powerful library the documentation is not too good. Well it is a complex topic. I am very happy with bstrlib. It allowed to implement complex string manipulations in a readable and secure way and I hope also helps to make the applications more robust and secure.

To further improve security I check all user provided input for a maximum length to prevent overflows. As I use getopt for the command line arguments

I still rely on how they cope with this issues. Still the overflow will not occur in my code :-).

likwid also blogs now !!

For the Unaware: likwid stand for Like I Knew What Im Doing. It is a collection of lightweight, simple and easy to use tools targeted to the experienced performance aware programmer in a multicore Linux environment.

I will post news and development issues around likwid here.

As I have time I might also add some general thoughts about computer architecture and performance oriented programming.

Stay tuned!