My company is stuck on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.7. Running perf record ls as non-root results in an error: "Perf session creation failed."
$ cat /proc/sys/kernel/perf_event_paranoid
1
$ uname -r
2.6.32-573.51.1.e16.x86_64
It works on Redhat 6.4. There was a patch to linux a while ago, but I can't tell if that was ported to Redhat 6.7.
