|  | Home · Charts · Time Control

# What's New in PCP

A detailed log of changes included in each PCP release is included on the PCP website as well as in the PCP source code, so here we aim to provide a more general overview of the significant changes between major versions.

PCP 3.0+

- Native Win32 port, replacing the Cygwin/MSVC hybrid

- Dynamic namespace support where PMDAs manage namespaces

- RPM packaging split into separate development, runtime and shared library packages

- PCP packages shipping with all major Linux distributions - Debian, Fedora, RHEL, SLES, Ubuntu.

- Local context API changes for finer control in tools.

- Import API changes and Perl module for creating archives.

- Cluster or server farm management improvements - pmieconf open sourced, pmlogconf completely redesigned.

- MMV PMDA open sourced (SGI) and Parfait Java instrumentation open sourced (Aconex).

PCP 2.3 - 2.9

- Mac OS X port and kernel PMDA included.

- Solaris port and kernel PMDA merged.

- AIX port and kernel PMDA merged.

- PCP test suite open sourced.

- FHS (filesystem hierarchy standard) compliance on Linux.

- IANA ports registered for pmcd and pmproxy daemons.

- Support for open source pmtime in some console tools.

- Support for Perl PMDAs introduced.

PCP 2.2 - Linux and IRIX

- First open source contributions from outside SGI.

- Linux and IRIX building from the same source tree.

- Introduction of /etc/pcp.conf to manage platform differences.

- Included in SGI Advanced Cluster Environment and SGI ProPack platforms for Linux.

- pmie extended to facilitate running as a daemon, startup and other support scripts introduced to aid management of pmie farms.

- Cross-platform namespace support - overhaul to remove the irix prefix for all kernel metrics.

- Estimation of PCP archive sizes. The -r option for pmlogger(1) causes the size of the physical record(s) for each group of metrics and the expected contribution of the group to the size of the PCP archive for one full day of collection to be reported in the log file. The -s option to pmdumplog(1) will report the size in bytes of each physical record in the archive.

PCP 2.0 - IRIX

- Distributed namespace - the PCP Performance Metrics Name Space (PMNS) had previously been local to the application wishing to make reference to PCP metrics by name. In PCP 2.0 the PMNS operations are now directed to the host or archive that is the source of the desired performance metrics. The default name space is now associated with the PCP collector host rather than PCP monitor host.

- Product structural changes, including the inclusion of pcp_eoe in SGI IRIX by default.

- pmlogsummary utility introduced for statistical log analysis.

- A new (smaller) format for PMDA help text files was introduced.

- pmlogger uses additional pmcd state change information to embed "mark" records in PCP archives when new PMDAs are started by pmcd. During replay, this prevents interpolation of values in the PCP archive across the life of an old and a new instance of the same PMDA.

Copyright © 2007-2010 Aconex | PCP