Add hardware counter profile

[bugRanger]

SUMMARY

It's great that version 1 added counter support, but the expected counter names don't always match what the system provides.

Based on previous attempts (1, 2), providing free input strings provides versatility, but there are also drawbacks:

• Inconvenient for teams working in different configurations;
• Strings in attributes lead to a lot of duplicate code;

Therefore, an option with a profile description for extracting the required value sets could solve these problems.

UPD: Added simple test for ETW with custom profile, output result:

BenchmarkDotNet v0.16.0-develop (2026-06-25), Windows 10 (10.0.19045.6456/22H2/2022Update)
AMD Ryzen 7 5700G with Radeon Graphics 3.80GHz, 1 CPU, 16 logical and 8 physical cores
Memory: 27,9 GB Total, 13,77 GB Available
.NET SDK 10.0.103
  [Host] : .NET 8.0.24 (8.0.24, 8.0.2426.7010), X64 RyuJIT x86-64-v3
  Dry    : .NET 8.0.24 (8.0.24, 8.0.2426.7010), X64 RyuJIT x86-64-v3

Job=Dry  IterationCount=1  LaunchCount=1  
RunStrategy=ColdStart  UnrollFactor=1  

| Method         | Mean     | Error | FakeCacheMisses1/Op | FakeCacheMisses3/Op | FakeCacheMisses2/Op |
|--------------- |---------:|------:|--------------------:|--------------------:|--------------------:|
| SortedBranch   | 143.1 μs |    NA |             581,632 |             581,632 |              45,056 |
| UnsortedBranch | 180.3 μs |    NA |             577,536 |             577,536 |              45,056 |

[bugRanger]

@dotnet-policy-service agree

[timcassell]

It's an interesting approach. But it looks like you can only remap existing HardwareCounter enum members to machine-specific hardware counter names. I'm by no means an expert when it comes to hardware counters, but do we need to handle the case of a hardware counter that is not mapped to an existing enum member? Or in those cases we will just need to expand the enum to cover new cases?

[filzrev]

If this project is not expected to be executed on CI.

Is it able to define these tests on BenchmarkDotNet.IntegrationTests.ManualRunning project side?

[filzrev]

This test has ETW namespace.
Is this test works on non-Windows environment?

[timcassell]

I would not expect it to. #388 (comment)

[filzrev]

I would not expect it to.

In that case, I think it need to replace [Fact] to use [EnvSpecificFact(EnvRequirement.WindowsOnly)].