Xen project Mailing List

On Mon, Nov 2, 2015 at 10:33 AM, Ian Campbell <ian.campbell@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Sun, 2015-10-25 at 18:51 -0400, Jintack Lim wrote:
>
>
> On Fri, Oct 23, 2015 at 9:44 AM, Ian Campbell <ian.campbell@xxxxxxxxxx>
> wrote:
> > On Fri, 2015-10-23 at 09:22 -0400, Jintack Lim wrote:
> > > Hi,
> > >
> > > I'm working on ARM64 (AppliedMicroâ X-Gene).
> > > I wanted to run perf to collect some hardware events, but I got some
> > > trouble.
> > > Basically I have two questions.
> > >
> > > 1.
> > > I found that pmu is not registered in the device tree,
> > > while it is registered on native linux (installed on the same type of
> > > machine) .
> > > Can I just modify device tree at booting time to make it look like
> > native
> > > linux?
> > > Will it work?
> >
> > > Additional information is at the bottom.
> > >
> > > 2.
> > > I found that running perf on Xen 4.5.0 resulted in segmentation fault
> > (or
> > > system crash),
> > > however it runs well on the latest Xen on git server.
> > > Can somebody point the patch that makes this change?
> >
> > 4.5.0 was vulnerable to XSA-93:
> >
> > http://xenbits.xen.org/xsa/advisory-93.html
> >
> > The core issue with PMU is that Xen currently does not know how to context
> > switch the relevant state when changing guests. Fixing that would be more
> > work than just fiddling with device tree.
> >
> > You might be able to bodge something useful (but unsupported) together by
> > just allowing only dom0 to access these registers and to see the values
> > collected from the whole system (i.e. don't worry about context switching).
> > How useful such numbers would be depends somewhat on what you are hoping to
> > find out from this exercise.
> My machine has 8 cores,
> and I'm running dom0 on core 0~3, and domU on 4~7.
> I wonder if running perf on dom0 can profile hardware events on cores, on
> which dom0 is not running.

Please remember: performance counter use from guests is not something
currently supported by Xen on ARM, so perf on dom0 cannot, in a formally
supported sense, profile anything at all.

If you are talking about using the bodge mentioned above then of course it
can only profile things running on processors to which it has (pinned, 1:1)
access and there may be other more serious caveats I've not thought of
because this is not something which is supported.

Thanks, Ian.

I have two questions.

1. What's the reason why perf is not supported by Xen on ARM?

Is it because of what you've mentioned before?

"The core issue with PMU is that Xen currently does not know how to context

switch the relevant state when changing guests. "

2. I'm trying to make it work in a limited environment (pined, 1:1) on Dom0.

It's a bit awkward (and I'm sorry) to ask questions about something not supported,

but even a simple comment will be really helpful!

The problem I have is that Xen is getting FIQ for pmu overflow interrupts.

It looks like group 0 interrupts are enabled and FIQen bit is not set, by this line inÂxen/arch/arm/gic-v2.c

writel_gicc(GICC_CTL_ENABLE|GICC_CTL_EOI, GICC_CTLR);

So, I think FIQ should not come, can it?

Instead of getting panic because of FIQ,

I tried to make it run as normal IRQ by

modifying entry.S, and routing FIQ to normal IRQ function by calling do_trap_fiq.

System didn't go panic, but it was just hanging there.

I'm a bit lost where to start to fix this.

I think getting IRQ instead of FIQ is the first step.

Do you have any suggestions?

Thanks,

Jintack

Ian.

> If not, then I should run perf on domU I guess.
>
> >
> > Ian.
> >
> >
> >

Re: [Xen-users] perf hardware event on ARM64