IBM POWER9 PMU (Performance Monitoring Unit) is not available on SLES 11 SP4

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Environment

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 Service Pack 4 (SLES 11 SP4)

Situation

When running SLES 11 SP4 in p8compat mode on an IBM POWER9 server, the POWER9 PMU (Performance Monitoring Unit) is not available since the PMU driver is not included. As such, 'perf' and other performance monitoring tools which depend on the PMU may not function as expected. In addition, certain other tools that use the PMU (such as 'ppc64_cpu --frequency') also won't function.

Resolution

POWER9 PMU support is available in SLES 12 starting with SP3.

Disclaimer

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