ARM A9 MPCore support in OProfile ?

[Will Deacon]

Hi Aneesh,

On Mon, 2010-05-10 at 15:41 +0100, Catalin Marinas wrote:
> On Mon, 2010-05-10 at 12:29 +0100, Aneesh Bhasin wrote:
> > Had sent this to the oprofile-list too, but did not get any reply.
> > Hopefully, someone here who has experience with this could help..
> >
> > Can someone please tell what is the status of support for ARM A9
> > MPCore PMU in OProfile ?
> >
> > I was browsing the linux-arm repository at
> >
> > http://www.linux-arm.org/git?p=linux-2.6-stable.git;a=summary
> >
> > and could see that it has support for A9 MPCore but could not find
> > anything related to it in the OProfile source-code (e.g .in
> > events/arm). Is there any patch that needs to be applied to use A9
> > MPCore PMU with OProfile ?
> 
> The Oprofile patches (by Will Deacon) are in Russell's devel tree and
> intended for upstream merge:
> 
> http://ftp.arm.linux.org.uk/git/gitweb.cgi?p=linux-2.6-arm.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/devel
> 
> My stable repository has some old Oprofile implementation (it requires
> additional patches for user space - I can dig them out if you really
> need them but I would recommend Will's version).
> 
As Catalin has pointed out, the Kernel patches are in Russell's tree now
so should make their way upstream via the usual route. For OProfile,
there is a trivial userspace patch to add A9 support which I plan to
post to the OProfile mailing list next week. In the meantime, you could
use perf events, which doesn't need any patches to the userspace tools.

Will