• Paul Mackerras's avatar
    perf_counter: powerpc: allow use of limited-function counters · ab7ef2e5
    Paul Mackerras authored
    POWER5+ and POWER6 have two hardware counters with limited functionality:
    PMC5 counts instructions completed in run state and PMC6 counts cycles
    in run state.  (Run state is the state when a hardware RUN bit is 1;
    the idle task clears RUN while waiting for work to do and sets it when
    there is work to do.)
    
    These counters can't be written to by the kernel, can't generate
    interrupts, and don't obey the freeze conditions.  That means we can
    only use them for per-task counters (where we know we'll always be in
    run state; we can't put a per-task counter on an idle task), and only
    if we don't want interrupts and we do want to count in all processor
    modes.
    
    Obviously some counters can't go on a limited hardware counter, but there
    are also situations where we can only put a counter on a limited hardware
    counter - if there are already counters on that exclude some processor
    modes and we want to put on a per-task cycle or instruction counter that
    doesn't exclude any processor mode, it could go on if it can use a
    limited hardware counter.
    
    To keep track of these constraints, this adds a flags argument to the
    processor-specific get_alternatives() functions, with three bits defined:
    one to say that we can accept alternative event codes that go on limited
    counters, one to say we only want alternatives on limited counters, and
    one to say that this is a per-task counter and therefore events that are
    gated by run state are equivalent to those that aren't (e.g. a "cycles"
    event is equivalent to a "cycles in run state" event).  These flags
    are computed for each counter and stored in the counter->hw.counter_base
    field (slightly wonky name for what it does, but it was an existing
    unused field).
    
    Since the limited counters don't freeze when we freeze the other counters,
    we need some special handling to avoid getting skew between things counted
    on the limited counters and those counted on normal counters.  To minimize
    this skew, if we are using any limited counters, we read PMC5 and PMC6
    immediately after setting and clearing the freeze bit.  This is done in
    a single asm in the new write_mmcr0() function.
    
    The code here is specific to PMC5 and PMC6 being the limited hardware
    counters.  Being more general (e.g. having a bitmap of limited hardware
    counter numbers) would have meant more complex code to read the limited
    counters when freezing and unfreezing the normal counters, with
    conditional branches, which would have increased the skew.  Since it
    isn't necessary for the code to be more general at this stage, it isn't.
    
    This also extends the back-ends for POWER5+ and POWER6 to be able to
    handle up to 6 counters rather than the 4 they previously handled.
    Signed-off-by: default avatarPaul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
    Acked-by: default avatarPeter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
    Cc: Robert Richter <robert.richter@amd.com>
    LKML-Reference: <18936.19035.163066.892208@cargo.ozlabs.ibm.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarIngo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
    ab7ef2e5
ppc970-pmu.c 11.6 KB