measuring cache misses for a C program

if you mean hardware cache misses that occur when memory items are not in the CPU cache then no - the C run-time provides no such platform specific feature. There may be a low level API for this but i should imagaine it will be CPU specific and only accessible from assembler.

if you mean from within your own data structures then you can code some hit counters quite easily and then report on them before your application exits.

-P

For some direction use:

http://www.idiom.com/~zilla/Computer/cachekiller.html

The valgrind program does exactly what you're looking for.  It simulates execution of your binary program, including the behavior of your instruction and data caches, and can produce a summary report for all the memory accesses made by the program.

Forgot the link:  http://valgrind.org/

I'm not quite sure how valgrind can do all this, as there are sooo many different cache strategies in use, some secret.

Also valgrind isnt going to be able to simulate cache losses due the OS and interrupts taking up code and data cache space.

I'd suggest  if you need really accurate results stick with the hardware counters.

They're documented in Appendix A of:

ftp://download.intel.com/design/Pentium4/manuals/25366815.pdf


Really a whole lot of stuff.

can I use VTune performance analyser tool to measure hardware performance counter
for C programs