This package provides a library called libpfm4, which is used to develop monitoring tools exploiting the performance monitoring events such as those provided by the Performance Monitoring Unit (PMU) of modern processors.

Libpfm4 helps convert from an event name, expressed as a string, to the event encoding that is either the raw event as documented by the hardware vendor or the OS-specific encoding. In the latter case, the library is able to prepare the OS-specific data structures needed by the kernel to setup the event.

libpfm4 provides support for the perf_events interface, which was introduced in Linux 2.6.31.