[PATCH v4 05/12] arm-cci: PMU: Add support for transactions

[Peter Zijlstra]

On Fri, Dec 18, 2015 at 10:58:17AM +0000, Suzuki K. Poulose wrote:

> We have a global Enable/Disable for CCI PMU and thats what we use
> currently. To be able to reprogram the counters with the event period
> (we program the counter with a specific count in pmu::start() and at
> overflow irq handler, not to be confused with the sampling period, which
> is not supported), we need to be sure that the counter value has been updated.
> 
> May be we could check the event->hw->state to see if we need to reprogram it.

Right, have a look at arch/x86/kernel/cpu/perf_event.c:x86_pmu_enable()

If there's new events, it does two loops over the events.

The first loop does stop(PERF_EF_UPDATE) any counter that got moved.
The second loop does start(PERF_EF_RELOAD) on moved and new events.

The PERF_HES_ARCH bit is used to preserve the stopped state of counters
that were programmed but temporarily stopped.