Simple assembly programs to test the performance counter results reported by perf, as described here.

Requires nasm.

To compile:

make

Binary Details

Making the project produces three binaries in the root folder: perf-test-nop, -mul and -div. In the inner loop they use no-ops, an imul and a idiv instruction respectively. The upshot is that each loop iteration takes 1 cycle, 3 cycles or ~40 cycles respectively, at least on modern Intel hardware.

Usage

perf-test-nop N
perf-test-mul N
perf-test-div N

Each binary takes an argument N from 0-99 which specifies how many loop iterations to execute. The "nop" and "mul" binaries execute N * 1e9 (i.e., N billion) iterations, while the "div" binary executes N * 1e8 (i.e., N hundred million) iterations. This 10x discrepancy keeps the runtime manageable for the div variant (which would otherwise take 20 minutes or so for N=99).