[PATCH 0/4] coresight: Add ETR-PERF polling.

[Denis Nikitin]

Hi Leo,

Sorry for the delayed reply.

On Tue, May 18, 2021 at 7:00 AM Leo Yan <leo.yan at linaro.org> wrote:
>
> Hi Denis,
>

> > Performance overhead is indeed higher than with ETR polling patch.
> > Here are some numbers for comparison (measured on browser
> > Speedometer2 benchmark):
> > Runtime overhead of ETM tracing with ETR poll period 100ms is less than
> > 0.5%. Snapshot mode gives 2.1%.
> > With 10ms period I see 4.6% with ETR polling and 22% in snapshot mode.
>
> It's not expected that the snapshot mode causes so big overload.
> In my head, two factors might cause the overload:
>
> - The perf interaction between the user space and kernel space;
> - The data copying from the ETR's buffer to the AUX ring buffer.
>
> Check one thing: what's the buffer size for ETR polling mode and for
> snapshot mode in your experiments?

AUX buffer size was 64KB in both modes.
I used small buffers to keep the overall perf.data size under 200-500MB
with a long-running perf record (3-5 min).

>
> If I remember correctly, by default the snapshot mode uses 4MB for ETR
> buffer, if copying 4MB per 10ms, then it's likely to cause big
> overload.  So at the first glance, the overhead difference might be
> caused by the by the different buffer size between ETR poll mode and
> snapshot mode.

As I said, the buffer was small. But I can go ahead and check the difference
with a bigger buffer.
I will also double check how strobing affects runtime overhead. It
should be lower.

>
> > We could probably utilize the ETM strobing feature and reduce frequency
> > of data collection but I see a problem when I'm using both.
> > Within a minute of profiling the ETM generates a reasonable profile size
> > (with strobing autofdo,preset=9 with period 0x1000 it is up to 20MB).
> > But then the size grows unproportionally.
> > With a 4 minute run I got a 6.3GB profile.
>
> Just check, as Mathieu has suggested, have you applied the patch [1]
> on your local code base for fixing the data copying for snapshot mode?

That was my mistake. When I switched to the Strobing patch series
I forgot to apply [1].
When applied I don't see this issue any more.
It's not obvious from the description that the patch would fix my issue.
So it sounds like your patch fixes multiple problems :)

Thanks,
Denis

[...]
>
> Thanks,
> Leo
>
> [1]. https://lists.linaro.org/pipermail/coresight/2021-April/006254.html