[RFC] About perf-mem command support on arm64 platform

[Shaokun Zhang]

Hi all,

perf-mem is used to profile memory access which has been implemented on x86
platform. It needs mem-stores events and mem-loads/load-latency.
For mem-stores events, it is MEM_INST_RETIRED_ALL_STORES whose raw number
is r82d0, and mem-loads/load-latency is from PEBS if I follow its code.

Now, for some arm64 cores, like HiSilicon's tsv110 and ARM's Neoverse N1,
has supported the SPE(Statistical Profiling Extensions), so is it a
possibility that perf-mem is supported on arm64?
https://developer.arm.com/ip-products/processors/neoverse/neoverse-n1

For arm64 PMU, it has 'st_retired' event that the event number is 0x0007
which is equal to mem-stores on x86, if we want support perf-mem, it seems
that 'st_retired' shall be replaced by 'mem-stores'
in arch/arm64/kernel/perf_event.c file. Of course, the cpu core should
support st_retired event. I'm not sure Will/Mark are happy on this.;-)

For mem-loads/load-latency, we can derive them from SPE sampled data which
supports by load_filter and min_latency in SPE driver. and we may do some
work on tools/perf/builtin-mem.c.

>From the above conditions, it seems that we may have the opportunity to
support the perf-mem command on arm64.
I'm not very sure about it, so I send this RFC and any comments are welcome.

Thanks,
Shaokun