When you do:
        $ perf record -e cycles,cycles,cycles noploop 10

You expect about 10,000 samples for each event, i.e., 10s at
1000samples/sec. However, this is not what's happening. You
get much fewer samples, maybe 3700 samples/event:

$ perf report -D | tail -15
Aggregated stats:
           TOTAL events:      10998
            MMAP events:         66
            COMM events:          2
          SAMPLE events:      10930
cycles stats:
           TOTAL events:       3644
          SAMPLE events:       3644
cycles stats:
           TOTAL events:       3642
          SAMPLE events:       3642
cycles stats:
           TOTAL events:       3644
          SAMPLE events:       3644

On a Intel Nehalem or even AMD64, there are 4 counters capable
of measuring cycles, so there is plenty of space to measure those
events without multiplexing (even with the NMI watchdog active).
And even with multiplexing, we'd expect roughly the same number
of samples per event.

The root of the problem was that when the event that caused the buffer
to become full was not the first event passed on the cmdline, the user
notification would get lost. The notification was sent to the file
descriptor of the overflowed event but the perf tool was not polling
on it.  The perf tool aggregates all samples into a single buffer,
i.e., the buffer of the first event. Consequently, it assumes
notifications for any event will come via that descriptor.

The seemingly straight forward solution of moving the waitq into the
ringbuffer object doesn't work because of life-time issues. One could
perf_event_set_output() on a fd that you're also blocking on and cause
the old rb object to be freed while its waitq would still be
referenced by the blocked thread -> FAIL.

Therefore link all events to the ringbuffer and broadcast the wakeup
from the ringbuffer object to all possible events that could be waited
upon. This is rather ugly, and we're open to better solutions but it
works for now.
Reported-by: Stephane Eranian <eranian@google.com>
Finished-by: Stephane Eranian <eranian@google.com>
Reviewed-by: Stephane Eranian <eranian@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20111126014731.GA7030@quadSigned-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>