PL310 counters in Samsung Exynos 4 Quad using Streamline

Question

L2 cache misses in Samsung Exynos 4 Quad using Streamline

Is it possible to measure PL310 events using the DS-5 Streamline? The target device is Samsung Galaxy S3 with Exynos 4 Quad SoC and Cortex A9 cores. The device runs Android.

-Dhinakaran

Answer

Yes, this should work fine when using a recent version of gator.

I'd recommend to use gator v17, shipped in DS-5 5.17.1 (latest), which can be downloaded here: ARM Development Studio 5

After installing DS-5, gator can be found here:  <DS-5_install_path>/arm/gator

Then, you will have to re-build the gator driver and daemon by following these instructions.

The PL310 counters have to added in the Streamline Configuration Window.

I hope this helps.

Marcelo

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  • Thanks Marcelo. I was able to access these counters. But, I have some doubts regarding the counter values.

    I see that the L2 Data Read Requests counter of the PL310 L2 Cache controller is almost twice as L1 Data refills when the program that I am executing is mostly doing Loads. I would expect both these counters to report similar values. Am I missing something?

    The PL310's Speculative Reads Received co-relates with the L1 Data refills, but the Data Read Requests counter doesn't.

    Processor: ARM cortex A9 MPCore in Exynos 4412

Reply
  • Thanks Marcelo. I was able to access these counters. But, I have some doubts regarding the counter values.

    I see that the L2 Data Read Requests counter of the PL310 L2 Cache controller is almost twice as L1 Data refills when the program that I am executing is mostly doing Loads. I would expect both these counters to report similar values. Am I missing something?

    The PL310's Speculative Reads Received co-relates with the L1 Data refills, but the Data Read Requests counter doesn't.

    Processor: ARM cortex A9 MPCore in Exynos 4412

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