A memoryspace profile is a profile in which memory-related events such as cache misses, are reported against the physical structures of the machine, such as cache-lines, memory-banks, or pages.
A dataspace profile is a profile in which those memory-related events, are reported against the data structures whose references cause the events rather than just the instructions where the memory-related events occur. Dataspace profiling is only available on SPARC systems running Oracle Solaris. It is not yet available on x86 systems running either Oracle Solaris or Linux.
For either memoryspace or dataspace profiling, the data collected must be hardware counter profiles using a memory-based counter. For precise counters, on either SPARC or x86 Oracle Solaris platforms, memoryspace and dataspace data is collected by default.
In order to support dataspace profiling, executables should be compiled with the -xhwcprof flag. This flag is applicable to compiling with the C, C++ and Fortran compilers, but is only meaningful on SPARC platforms. The flag is ignored on other platforms. If executables are not compiled with -xhwcprof, the data_layout, data_single, and data_objects commands from er_print will not show the data. Memoryspace profiling does not require -xhwcprof for precise counters.
When an experiment includes a dataspace or memoryspace profile, the er_print utility allows three additional commands: data_objects, data_single, and data_layout, as well as various commands relating to memory objects. See Commands That Control the Dataspace List for more information.
In addition, the Performance Analyzer includes two views related to dataspace profiling and various tabs for memory objects. See DataObjects View and DataLayout View and MemoryObjects Views.
Running collect -h with no additional arguments lists hardware counters, and specifies whether they are load, store, or load-store related and whether they are precise. See Hardware Counter Profiling Data.