What's new in ARM Streamline – DS-5 v5.21

We have just released a new version of ARM DS-5 Development Studio, and here I am presenting the new features of Streamline performance analyzer. In this release we have focused on supporting new ARM semiconductor IP, adding new features for Linux and Android profiling, and enhancing the user experience, helping our partners to get the best out of the tool and their device.

New ARM semiconductor IP support

In order to help ARM's partners reduce their time to market in terms of system bring-up and software support, we aim to enable support for ARM's new IP ahead of silicon availability. In 2015 we have introduced support for the Cortex-A72 CPU, from version 5.20.2, and the Mali-T800 GPU series, which add to the extensive list of supported application and graphics processors.

Custom Activity Map

Since version 5.19, the OpenCL™ timeline works with user space gator. The same interface, called ‘Custom Activity Map’ (CAM), is now open and generic, ready to be used with other APIs or other implementations of OpenCL. Any system or driver that relies on running jobs, tracking their complex dependencies and managing limited resources, can benefit from this kind of visualization. The new "CAM" macros allow you to define and visualize a complex dependency chain of jobs. You can define a custom activity map (CAM) view, add tracks to it and submit jobs with single or multiple dependencies to be visualized in Streamline.

OpenCL mode in the Timeline view

Ftrace support

Since version 5.20, gator (the Streamline agent) has support for reading generic files based on entries in events XML files. This feature allows you to add counters to extract data held in files, for example, /dev, /sys or /proc file entries. Streamline also supports reading ftrace data, and in version 5.21 we have added stock ftrace counters. This means that the following ftrace counters can be visualized in Streamline by default:

• Kmem: Number of bytes allocated in the kernel using kmalloc
• Ext4: Number of bytes written to an ext4 filesystem
• F2FS: Number of bytes written to an f2fs filesystem
• Power: Clock rate state
• Block Completed: Number of block IO operations completed by device driver
• Block Issued: Number of block IO operations issued to device driver
• Power: Number of times cpu_idle is entered or exited.

You can use a similar technique to add counters for ftrace data. Any other ftrace counter can be added to Streamline by providing an events.xml file including regex filters, e.g.:

<event counter="ftrace_trace_marker_numbers"
       title="ftrace"
       name="trace_marker"
       regex="^tracing_mark_write: ([0-9]+)\s$"
       class="absolute">

Which can be tested by executing:

$ echo 42 > /sys/kernel/debug/tracing/trace_marker

To make things much easier and faster, you can now append events to gator without rebuilding it via the -E option. For more information, check out the Streamline User Guide.

New color schemes and user experience improvements

In this release we have also improved the user experience, providing additional color schemes, and refreshing the UI, including:

• New UI for the processes area (heat map)
• Reordering of threads, groups, channels, OpenCL lines
• Allow user to select source file instead of using the path prefix substitution
• Introduced the incident counter class.

New color schemes in Streamline version 5.21

Availability

Our internal developers and many customers are already using and benefiting from these new features. DS-5 5.21 is available to download now, so check it out today. Stay tuned to see what our engineering teams are building for the next version.