• Mark Rutland's avatar
    perf pmu: Support alternative sysfs cpumask · 7e3fcffe
    Mark Rutland authored
    The perf tools can read a cpumask file for a PMU, describing a subset of
    CPUs which that PMU covers. So far this has only been used to cater for
    uncore PMUs, which in practice happen to only have a single CPU
    described in the mask.
    
    Until recently, the perf tools only correctly handled cpumask containing
    a single CPU, and only when monitoring in system-wide mode. For example,
    prior to commit 00e727bb ("perf stat: Balance opening and
    reading events"), a mask with more than a single CPU could cause perf
    stat to hang. When a CPU PMU covers a subset of CPUs, but lacks a
    cpumask, perf record will fail to open events (on the cores the PMU does
    not support), and gives up.
    
    For systems with heterogeneous CPUs such as ARM big.LITTLE systems, this
    presents a problem. We have a PMU for each microarchitecture (e.g. a big
    PMU and a little PMU), and would like to expose a cpumask for each (so
    as to allow perf record and other tools to do the right thing). However,
    doing so kernel-side will cause old perf binaries to not function (e.g.
    hitting the issue solved by 00e727bb), and thus commits the
    cardinal sin of breaking (existing) userspace.
    
    To address this chicken-and-egg problem, this patch adds support got a
    new file, cpus, which is largely identical to the existing cpumask file.
    A kernel can expose this file, knowing that new perf binaries will
    correctly support it, while old perf binaries will not look for it (and
    thus will not be broken).
    Signed-off-by: default avatarMark Rutland <mark.rutland@arm.com>
    Cc: Alexander Shishkin <alexander.shishkin@linux.intel.com>
    Cc: Jiri Olsa <jolsa@kernel.org>
    Cc: Mark Rutland <mark.rutland@arm.com>
    Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
    Cc: Will Deacon <will.deacon@arm.com>
    Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1473330112-28528-8-git-send-email-mark.rutland@arm.comSigned-off-by: default avatarArnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
    7e3fcffe
pmu.c 22.4 KB