Just use Instruments. Yes, I know it’s slow, but it’s miles ahead of anything on Linux. If you’re looking for an identical profiling experience on macOS as you get on Linux you’re greatly missing out.
Regarding branch profiling, all arm64 (M1+) cpus support these counters: - BRANCH_CALL_INDIR_MISPRED_NONSPEC - BRANCH_COND_MISPRED_NONSPEC - BRANCH_INDIR_MISPRED_NONSPEC - BRANCH_MISPRED_NONSPEC - BRANCH_RET_INDIR_MISPRED_NONSPEC - INST_BRANCH - INST_BRANCH_CALL - INST_BRANCH_COND - INST_BRANCH_INDIR - INST_BRANCH_RET - INST_BRANCH_TAKEN
afaik there is no limitation to implementing the fetching of all these counters based on ibireme’s research on kperf. btw, forked "poop" already can fetch BRANCH_MISPRED_NONSPEC.