[PATCH v3 4/4] Documentation: coresight: Expand branch broadcast documentation

James Clark james.clark at arm.com
Wed May 11 07:46:01 PDT 2022


Now that there is a way of enabling branch broadcast via perf, mention
the possible use cases and known limitations.

Signed-off-by: James Clark <james.clark at arm.com>
---
 .../trace/coresight/coresight-etm4x-reference.rst   | 13 ++++++++++++-
 1 file changed, 12 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)

diff --git a/Documentation/trace/coresight/coresight-etm4x-reference.rst b/Documentation/trace/coresight/coresight-etm4x-reference.rst
index 0439b4006227..fb7578fd9372 100644
--- a/Documentation/trace/coresight/coresight-etm4x-reference.rst
+++ b/Documentation/trace/coresight/coresight-etm4x-reference.rst
@@ -656,7 +656,18 @@ Bit assignments shown below:-
     ETM_MODE_BB
 
 **description:**
-    Set to enable branch broadcast if supported in hardware [IDR0].
+    Set to enable branch broadcast if supported in hardware [IDR0]. The primary use for this feature
+    is when code is patched dynamically at run time and the full program flow may not be able to be
+    reconstructed using only conditional branches.
+
+    There is currently no support in Perf for supplying modified binaries to the decoder, so this
+    feature is only inteded to be used for debugging purposes or with a 3rd party tool.
+
+    Choosing this option will result in a significant increase in the amount of trace generated -
+    possible danger of overflows, or fewer instructions covered. Note, that this option also
+    overrides any setting of :ref:`ETM_MODE_RETURNSTACK <coresight-return-stack>`, so where a branch
+    broadcast range overlaps a return stack range, return stacks will not be available for that
+    range.
 
 .. _coresight-cycle-accurate:
 
-- 
2.28.0




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