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arXiv · 2112.11767

Supporting RISC-V Performance Counters through Performance analysis tools for Linux (Perf)

Joao Mario Domingos·Pedro Tomas·Leonel Sousa
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Abstract

Increased attention to RISC-V in Cloud, Data Center, Automotive and Networking applications, has been fueling the move of RISC-V to the high-performance computing scenario. However, lack of powerful performance monitoring tools will result in poorly optimized applications and, consequently, a limited computing performance. While the RISC-V ISA already defines a hardware performance monitor (HPM), current software gives limited support for monitoring performance. In this paper we introduce extensions and modifications to the Performance analysis tools for Linux(perf/perf_events), Linux kernel, and OpenSBI, aiming to achieve full support for the RISC-V performance monitoring specification. Preliminary testing and evaluation was carried out in Linux 5.7 running on a FPGA booted CVA6 CPU, formerly named Ariane, showing a monitoring overhead of 0.283%.

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Joao Mario Domingos, Pedro Tomas, Leonel Sousa. 2021-12-22. Supporting RISC-V Performance Counters through Performance analysis tools for Linux (Perf). https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.11767

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