On Wed, Aug 14, 2024 at 05:28:42PM +0100, James Clark wrote:
On 07/08/2024 9:54 am, Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
On 01.08.24 21:05, Ian Rogers wrote:
On Wed, Dec 6, 2023 at 4:09 AM Linux regression tracking #update
(Thorsten Leemhuis) <regressions@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
[TLDR: This mail in primarily relevant for Linux kernel regression
tracking. See link in footer if these mails annoy you.]
On 22.11.23 00:43, Bagas Sanjaya wrote:
On Tue, Nov 21, 2023 at 09:08:48PM +0900, Hector Martin wrote:
Perf broke on all Apple ARM64 systems (tested almost everything), and
according to maz also on Juno (so, probably all big.LITTLE) since v6.5.
#regzbot fix: perf parse-events: Make legacy events lower priority than
sysfs/JSON
#regzbot ignore-activity
Note, this is still broken.
Hmmm, so all that became somewhat messy. Arnaldo, what's the way out of
this? Or is this a "we are screwed one way or another and someone has to
bite the bullet" situation?
Ciao, Thorsten
The patch changed the priority in the case
that you do something like:
$ perf stat -e 'armv8_pmuv3_0/cycles/' benchmark
but if you do:
$ perf stat -e 'cycles' benchmark
then the broken behavior will happen as legacy events have priority
over sysfs/json events in that case. To fix this you need to revert:
4f1b067359ac Revert "perf parse-events: Prefer sysfs/JSON hardware
events over legacy"
This causes some testing issues resolved in this unmerged patch series:
https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20240510053705.2462258-1-irogers@xxxxxxxxxx/
There is a bug as the arm_dsu PMU advertises an event called "cycles"
and this PMU is present on Ampere systems. Reverting the commit above
will cause an issue as the commit 7b100989b4f6 ("perf evlist: Remove
__evlist__add_default") to fix ARM's BIG.little systems (opening a
cycles event on all PMUs not just 1) will cause the arm_dsu event to
be opened by perf record and fail as the event won't support sampling.
The patch https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20240525152927.665498-1-irogers@xxxxxxxxxx/
fixes this by only opening the cycles event on core PMUs when choosing
default events.
Rather than take this patch the revert happened as Linus runs the
command "perf record -e cycles:pp" (ie using a specified event and not
defaults) and considers it a regression in the perf tool that on an
Ampere system to need to do "perf record -e
'armv8_pmuv3_0/cycles/pp'". It was pointed out that not specifying -e
will choose the cycles event correctly and with better precision the
pp for systems that support it, but it was still considered a
regression in the perf tool so the revert was made to happen. There is
a lack of perf testing coverage for ARM, in particular as they choose
to do everything in a different way to x86. The patch in question was
in the linux-next tree for weeks without issues.
ARM/Ampere could fix this by renaming the event from cycles to
cpu_cycles, or by following Intel's convention that anything uncore
uses the name clockticks rather than cycles. This could break people
who rely on an event called arm_dsu/cycles/ but I imagine such people
are rare. There has been no progress I'm aware of on renaming the
event.
Making perf not terminate on opening an event for perf record seems
like the most likely workaround as that is at least something under
the tool maintainers control. ARM have discussed doing this on the
lists:
https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/f30f676e-a1d7-4d6b-94c1-3bdbd1448887@xxxxxxx/
but since the revert in v6.10 no patches have appeared for the v6.11
merge window. Feature work like coresight improvements and ARMv9 are
being actively pursued by ARM, but feature work won't resolve this
regression.
I got some hardware with the DSU PMU so I'm going to have a go at trying to
send some fixes for this. My initial idea was to try incorporate the "not
terminate on opening" change as discussed in the link directly above. And
then do the revert of the "revert of prefer sysfs/json".
FWIW I don't think Juno currently is broken if the kernel supports extended
type ID? I could have missed some output in this thread but it seems like
it's mostly related to Apple M hardware. I'm also a bit confused why the
"supports extended type" check fails there, but maybe the v6.9 commit
25412c036 from Mark is missing?
I sent a small fix the other day to make perf stat default arguments work on
Juno, and didn't notice anything out of the ordinary: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-perf-users/dac6ad1d-5aca-48b4-9dcb-ff7e54ca43f6@xxxxxxxxxx/T/#t
I agree that change is quite narrow but it does incrementally improve things
for the time being. It's possible that it would become redundant if I can
just include Ian's change to use strings for Perf stat.
Of course I only think I have a handle on the issue right now, seems like it
has a lot of moving parts and something else always comes up. If I hit a
wall at some point I will come back here.
Thanks for working on this, hopefully we'll get to a solution that keeps
all the expectations expressed in this thread about not breaking
existing muscle memory and that allows us to progress on this matter.
- Arnaldo