Halloween Spooktacular Day 1: The Challenge
As I explained in the announcement, collecting PMCs should have been simple. It’s simple at the hardware level, so it should be simple at the software level.
The Windows API, unfortunately, makes it heinously complex. Your Spooktacular Challenge is to hide that complexity and present a future user with something as simple as you can manage to make it.
Many of you follow our courses here in a variety of languages, so please feel free to define any style of API you want, in any language, so long as it is simple, easy to use, and provides the following three features:
CPUs provide a large number of PMCs — often more than a hundred — but only a few of them can be active at any time. Prior to collection, your API should allow the user to select which PMCs they are trying to collect.
Windows already provides an easy way for a user to know which PMCs are available through ETW on their machine. They can use the built-in wpr command in Windows like this:
