Re: [Qemu-arm] [PATCH V8 0/2] Add option to configure guest vPMU

[Wei Huang]

On 10/27/2016 09:28 AM, Peter Maydell wrote:
> On 26 October 2016 at 07:28, Wei Huang <address@hidden> wrote:
>> This patchset adds a pmu=[on/off] option to enable/disable vPMU support
>> for guest VM. There are several reasons to justify this option. First,
>> vPMU can be problematic for cross-migration between different SoC as perf
>> counters are architecture-dependent. It is more flexible to have an option
>> to turn it on/off. Secondly this option matches the "pmu" option as
>> supported in libvirt. To make sure backward compatible, a PMU-related
>> property is added to mach-virt machine types.
> 
> (Sorry, sent this as a reply to the v7 patch; resending to
> attach it to the right thread...)
> 
> So what actually are we defining as "the PMU exists" here?

"PMU exists" means that PMUv3 presence can be detected and related
driver can be loaded for guest VM:
* For DT: perf_event.c checks the presence of "armv8-pmuv3" in DT and do
armv8pmu_probe_pmu().
* For ACPI: Jeremy Linton submitted an ACPI-based ARM driver for
upstream. This can be loaded when "PMU exists" is detected.

Link:
http://lists.infradead.org/pipermail/linux-arm-kernel/2016-March/415372.html

> The PMU exists in ARMv7 and we do actually implement it
> in TCG for v7 and v8 cores (though it is a minimal
> architecturally-valid implementation which implements no events,
> only the cycle counter).

This option shouldn't affect the existing TCG implementation. It only
touch the recent hardware-assisted vPMU implemented by Shannon. In other
words, it adds an option for users to turn off Shannon's vPMU (for the
reasons of migration compatibility, etc)

> 
> Should the PMU registers in TCG which we currently provide on
> any v7-and-better CPU be hung off ARM_FEATURE_PMU instead ?
> (this would result in the behaviour of virt-2.6 for TCG
> changing in that we stop providing the PMU when we did
> before, but I guess that's OK.)
> 

So you want to disable cycle_count for TCG mode? Reading ARM doc, I
think cycle_count is minimally required for ARM (correct me if I am
wrong). Here is the description for PMCR.N bits:

"Number of event counters. A RO field that indicates the number counters
implemented. A value of 0b00000 in this field indicates that only the
Cycle Count Register PMCCNTR_EL0 is implemented. The value of this field
is the number of event counters implemented. This value is in the range
of 0b00000 , in which case only the PMCCNTR_EL0 is  implemented, to
0b11111 , which indicates that the PMCCNTR_EL0 and 31 event counters are
implemented."

If we want to disable cycle_count, QEMU has to declare PMCR
in-accessible, right?

> thanks
> -- PMM
>