The perf tools can read a cpumask file for a PMU, describing a subset of
CPUs which that PMU covers. So far this has only been used to cater for
uncore PMUs, which in practice happen to only have a single CPU
described in the mask.
Until recently, the perf tools only correctly handled cpumask containing
a single CPU, and only when monitoring in system-wide mode. For example,
prior to commit 00e727bb38 ("perf stat: Balance opening and
reading events"), a mask with more than a single CPU could cause perf
stat to hang. When a CPU PMU covers a subset of CPUs, but lacks a
cpumask, perf record will fail to open events (on the cores the PMU does
not support), and gives up.
For systems with heterogeneous CPUs such as ARM big.LITTLE systems, this
presents a problem. We have a PMU for each microarchitecture (e.g. a big
PMU and a little PMU), and would like to expose a cpumask for each (so
as to allow perf record and other tools to do the right thing). However,
doing so kernel-side will cause old perf binaries to not function (e.g.
hitting the issue solved by 00e727bb38), and thus commits the
cardinal sin of breaking (existing) userspace.
To address this chicken-and-egg problem, this patch adds support got a
new file, cpus, which is largely identical to the existing cpumask file.
A kernel can expose this file, knowing that new perf binaries will
correctly support it, while old perf binaries will not look for it (and
thus will not be broken).
Signed-off-by: Mark Rutland <mark.rutland@arm.com>
Cc: Alexander Shishkin <alexander.shishkin@linux.intel.com>
Cc: Jiri Olsa <jolsa@kernel.org>
Cc: Mark Rutland <mark.rutland@arm.com>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: Will Deacon <will.deacon@arm.com>
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1473330112-28528-8-git-send-email-mark.rutland@arm.com
Signed-off-by: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
7e3fcffe95