dotnet/BenchmarkDotNet

Unable to read some hardware counters on ZEN2 CPU

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#1,520 opened on Aug 21, 2020

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 (18 comments) (3 reactions) (0 assignees)C# (11,415 stars) (1,054 forks)batch import
Area:Diagnosersgood first issueup-for-grabs

Description

Having trouble reading 'CacheMisses' and 'InstructionsRetired' whenever I run the dotnet/performance benchmark suite. If I run the command from within the src\benchmarks\micro directory:

dotnet run -c Release -f netcoreapp5.0 --filter '*Bilinear*' --counters CacheMisses InstructionsRetired

I get the following error message:

// Validating benchmarks:
The counter CacheMisses is not available. Please make sure you are Windows 8+ without Hyper-V
The counter InstructionRetired is not available. Please make sure you are Windows 8+ without Hyper-V

I am able to get some counters to read by enabling IBS in my BIOS (technically wasn't called IBS, I had to disable SVM to get it to work). So the following command does work for me:

dotnet run -c Release -f netcoreapp5.0 --filter '*Bilinear*' --counters BranchMispredictions

If I profile a C# application outside of BenchmarkDotNet using AMD uProf, I can get cache miss and instructions retired statistics. I am also able to read all of the counters on my Skylake machine using the BenchmarkDotNet CLI without any issues.

Would appreciate any help that can be provided!

Contributor guide

Tech stack
csharp
Domain
performance
Issue type
bug
DifficultyEstimated implementation difficulty for a new contributor, from 1 for very small changes to 5 for expert-level work.
3
Estimated timeA rough time range for an experienced contributor to investigate, implement, test, and prepare a pull request.
3-5 days
Activity statusHow available the issue appears right now: fresh, active, stale, blocked, or waiting on maintainer input.
stale
ClarityHow clearly the issue explains the expected change, acceptance criteria, and next step.
mostly clear
Prerequisites
basic understanding of .NETfamiliarity with hardware performance countersWindows 8+ environment
Newbie friendlinessA 1-100 score estimating how approachable this issue is for first-time contributors.
30
Research direction
Investigate the hardware counter provider in BenchmarkDotNet's source code, particularly the Windows specific implementation for reading performance counters. The issue may be related to AMD ZEN2 specific counter availability or BIOS settings. Look into the error message generation in the counter validation logic and compare with AMD uProf's approach. Test on a ZEN2 machine with different BIOS configurations to isolate the cause.