Instead of failing on an unknown event, when new perf stat is run on
older kernels:
  $ ./perf stat true
  Error: open_counter returned with 22 (Invalid argument). /bin/dmesg
  may provide additional information.
  Fatal: Not all events could be opened.
Just ignore EINVAL and ENOSYS, we'll print the results as not counted:
 Performance counter stats for 'true':
          0.239483 task-clock               #    0.493 CPUs utilized
                 0 context-switches         #    0.000 M/sec
                 0 CPU-migrations           #    0.000 M/sec
                86 page-faults              #    0.359 M/sec
           704,766 cycles                   #    2.943 GHz
     <not counted> stalled-cycles
           381,961 instructions             #    0.54  insns per cycle
            69,626 branches                 #  290.735 M/sec
             4,594 branch-misses            #    6.60% of all branches
        0.
000485883  seconds time elapsed
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
Cc: Frederic Weisbecker <fweisbec@gmail.com>
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/n/tip-7y40wib8n1eqio5hjpn3dsrm@git.kernel.org
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
 
 
        list_for_each_entry(counter, &evsel_list->entries, node) {
                if (create_perf_stat_counter(counter) < 0) {
-                       if (errno == -EPERM || errno == -EACCES) {
+                       if (errno == EINVAL || errno == ENOSYS)
+                               continue;
+
+                       if (errno == EPERM || errno == EACCES) {
                                error("You may not have permission to collect %sstats.\n"
                                      "\t Consider tweaking"
                                      " /proc/sys/kernel/perf_event_paranoid or running as root.",