Phil,
On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 4:55 PM, Philip Mucci <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Hi Stefane,
>
> Thanks for this. Am I to understand that the original purpose of
> pfm_arch_start is to just flip the enable bits? Is counting supposed
> to be enabled after arch_restore_pmcs? My question is really, what is
> the counting state of the PMU supposed to be after restore? I read the
> below as restore is supposed to write+start the PMC's immediately.
>
pfm_arch_start() is used to enable monitoring. Unfortunately, this term
is too vague. There are vast differences in how you accomplish this across
architectures.
On IA-64, enable monitoring does not actually require touching the
PMU registers, but just a Processor Status Register (PSR). The register
is part of the *generic* machine state. The value of the PMU control bit
inside the PSR is saved/restored on PMU ctxsw. Thus we need to bootstrap
by initializing the value so it can be picked up on first context switch in.
Note that on IA-64, there is something to do in pfm_arch_start() regardless
of whether we are working on the current thread or not.
On X86, to enable monitoring, means to turn on at least one of the plm bits.
That means the PMC registers need to be written. But this is necessary ONLY
if working on the current thread. for non-self, this is all handled by
the context switch
in routine. There maybe other things to activate for self-monitoring
such as PEBS/DS
support. Until started, the actual PMC registers never get written by
pfm_write_pmcs(),
nor the context switch in routine. In a sense, most of what
pfm_arch_start() does on X86,
is also done by pfm_arch_restore_pmcs().
Hope this helps a bit.
> It's an interesting case on the SiCortex box, because the in-core
> PMU's have no enable bits (only domain bits) but the off-core PMU has
> a global enable bit, which need not be twiddled, as one can write 0's
> to the PMC's there and it won't count.
>
> Thanks.
>
> Phil
>
>
>
> On Mar 24, 2008, at 6:03 PM, stephane eranian wrote:
>
> > Hello Phil,
> >
> > pfm_arch_start() is not called during context switch. It is used only
> > during pfm_start() and on interrupts on certain architectures.
> >
> > pfm_restore_pmcs() is used on context switch to restore the pmcs
> > (config) registers.
> >
> > If all pfm_arch_start() does is to restore the pmcs, then it may as
> > well
> > call pfm_arch_restore_pmcs() instead of re-implementing the same
> > thing.
> >
> >
> >
> > On Mon, Mar 24, 2008 at 8:17 PM, Philip Mucci <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> > wrote:
> >> Hi Stefane,
> >>
> >> I'm trying to decipher the difference between these two. Currently on
> >> MIPS as there is no enable bit, these are both identical. Basically:
> >>
> >> for (i = 0; i < max_pmc; i++) {
> >> if (test_bit(i, set->used_pmcs))
> >> pfm_arch_write_pmc(ctx, i, set->pmcs[i]);
> >> }
> >>
> >> However, in looking at the comments in the code, I have a concern
> >> that
> >> they may both be being called on pfm_ctxsw() and thus I'm doing
> >> double
> >> writes to the registers. Can you comment on this?
> >>
> >> Phil
> >>
> >>
>
>
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