I would like to program and read the hardware performance counters offered on all recent x86 hardware.
On Linux there are the various perf_events systems to do this (and the perf utility to do it from outside an unmodified program).
Is there any such built-in facility in Windows? If no built-in facility exists, the second best would be another approach perhaps using third-party code, but that doesn't require me to get a driver signed.