Linux's Turbostat Utility Can Now Be Used For Reading Intel PMT Counters

Merged on Sunday prior to tagging the first release candidate of Linux 6.11 were some last minute updates to Turbostat, the tool that lives within the kernel source tree and used for reporting CPU frequency and idle statistics along with other useful metrics. With Linux 6.11, Turbostat is gaining some new abilities.

With the new kernel, the Turbostat utility is now able to report counters from Intel's Platform Monitoring Technology (PMT). Intel Platform Monitoring Technology is one of their newer ways of exposing telemetry across client, server, and companion products.

This new code for Turbostat allows reading PMT counters similar to the tool's MSR and perf counters. One of the initial focuses with this PMT integration is for Turbostat to be able to report Meteor Lake's DC6 residency metrics to user-space. Other PMT functionality can also be read via Turbostat but depends upon the necessary PMT metadata being supplied for analysis.

Those interested in tapping into Intel PMT telemetry via Turbostat can find the documentation and some examples as part of this merge that is part of this week's Linux 6.11-rc1 release.