Re: [PATCH] arc: perf: Enable generic "cache-references" and "cache-misses" events

From: Vineet Gupta
Date: Wed Aug 31 2016 - 15:05:38 EST


On 08/26/2016 10:31 AM, Vineet Gupta wrote:
> On 08/25/2016 04:49 AM, Alexey Brodkin wrote:
>> ...
>> [PERF_COUNT_ARC_EDTLB] = "edtlb", /* D-TLB Miss */
>> [PERF_COUNT_ARC_EITLB] = "eitlb", /* I-TLB Miss */
>> +
>> + [PERF_COUNT_HW_CACHE_REFERENCES] = "imemrdc", /* Instr: mem read cached */
>> + [PERF_COUNT_HW_CACHE_MISSES] = "dclm", /* D-cache Load Miss */
> I think this is duplicating a mistake we already have. I vaguely remember when
> doing some hackbench profiling last year with range based profiling confined to
> memset routine and saw that L1-dcache-misses was counting zero. This is because it
> only counts LD misses while memset only does ST.
>
> Performance counter stats for '/sbin/hackbench':
>
> 0 L1-dcache-misses
> 0 L1-dcache-load-misses
> 1846082 L1-dcache-store-misses
>
>
> @PeterZ do you concur that is wrong and we ought to setup 2 counters to do this
> correctly ?

Hi Peter / Will,

Can you provide some guidance here. So I looked at what others do -
ARMV7_PERFCTR_L1_DCACHE_REFILL counts both load and store misses, while ARC has 2
separate conditions for load or stores. Is there an existing mechanism to "group"
/ "add" them to give a cumulative PERF_COUNT_HW_CACHE_MISSES - is that what perf
event grouping is ?

Quoting from perf wiki @ https://perf.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Tutorial

"It can be interesting to try and pack events in a way that guarantees that event
A and B are always measured together. Although the perf_events kernel interface
provides support for event grouping, the current perf tool does *not*."

Thx,
-Vineet