Introduction
=============

The purpose of this code is to test which performance-related msr's are available. This is relevant especially for virtualized guest which follow different rules from native code. 

The best introduction to this is in Intel Software Developer's Manuals, available as pdf for free from [2]. Section 18.15 covers the different clocks and 17.14 focuses on the Time-Stamp Counter.






Terms
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msr: machine specific register. A term used with Intel processors to refer to special-purpose registers.

tsc: Time Stamp Counter. A counter that in (newer processors) is monotonously increasing at a constant rate.

 

Disclaimers
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This code is written in Rust so (a) it would have good performance and (b) I would learn the language.


References
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[1] http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2015-03-03/performance-tuning-linux-instances-on-ec2.html
[2] http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/processors/architectures-software-developer-manuals.html