Commit 6abde908 authored by Ionela Voinescu's avatar Ionela Voinescu Committed by Catalin Marinas

Documentation: arm64: document support for the AMU extension

The activity monitors extension is an optional extension introduced
by the ARMv8.4 CPU architecture.

Add initial documentation for the AMUv1 extension:
 - arm64/amu.txt: AMUv1 documentation
 - arm64/booting.txt: system registers initialisation
Signed-off-by: default avatarIonela Voinescu <ionela.voinescu@arm.com>
Reviewed-by: default avatarValentin Schneider <valentin.schneider@arm.com>
Cc: Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net>
Cc: Will Deacon <will@kernel.org>
Cc: Catalin Marinas <catalin.marinas@arm.com>
Signed-off-by: default avatarCatalin Marinas <catalin.marinas@arm.com>
parent 4fcdf106
=======================================================
Activity Monitors Unit (AMU) extension in AArch64 Linux
=======================================================
Author: Ionela Voinescu <ionela.voinescu@arm.com>
Date: 2019-09-10
This document briefly describes the provision of Activity Monitors Unit
support in AArch64 Linux.
Architecture overview
---------------------
The activity monitors extension is an optional extension introduced by the
ARMv8.4 CPU architecture.
The activity monitors unit, implemented in each CPU, provides performance
counters intended for system management use. The AMU extension provides a
system register interface to the counter registers and also supports an
optional external memory-mapped interface.
Version 1 of the Activity Monitors architecture implements a counter group
of four fixed and architecturally defined 64-bit event counters.
- CPU cycle counter: increments at the frequency of the CPU.
- Constant counter: increments at the fixed frequency of the system
clock.
- Instructions retired: increments with every architecturally executed
instruction.
- Memory stall cycles: counts instruction dispatch stall cycles caused by
misses in the last level cache within the clock domain.
When in WFI or WFE these counters do not increment.
The Activity Monitors architecture provides space for up to 16 architected
event counters. Future versions of the architecture may use this space to
implement additional architected event counters.
Additionally, version 1 implements a counter group of up to 16 auxiliary
64-bit event counters.
On cold reset all counters reset to 0.
Basic support
-------------
The kernel can safely run a mix of CPUs with and without support for the
activity monitors extension. Therefore, when CONFIG_ARM64_AMU_EXTN is
selected we unconditionally enable the capability to allow any late CPU
(secondary or hotplugged) to detect and use the feature.
When the feature is detected on a CPU, we flag the availability of the
feature but this does not guarantee the correct functionality of the
counters, only the presence of the extension.
Firmware (code running at higher exception levels, e.g. arm-tf) support is
needed to:
- Enable access for lower exception levels (EL2 and EL1) to the AMU
registers.
- Enable the counters. If not enabled these will read as 0.
- Save/restore the counters before/after the CPU is being put/brought up
from the 'off' power state.
When using kernels that have this feature enabled but boot with broken
firmware the user may experience panics or lockups when accessing the
counter registers. Even if these symptoms are not observed, the values
returned by the register reads might not correctly reflect reality. Most
commonly, the counters will read as 0, indicating that they are not
enabled.
If proper support is not provided in firmware it's best to disable
CONFIG_ARM64_AMU_EXTN. To be noted that for security reasons, this does not
bypass the setting of AMUSERENR_EL0 to trap accesses from EL0 (userspace) to
EL1 (kernel). Therefore, firmware should still ensure accesses to AMU registers
are not trapped in EL2/EL3.
The fixed counters of AMUv1 are accessible though the following system
register definitions:
- SYS_AMEVCNTR0_CORE_EL0
- SYS_AMEVCNTR0_CONST_EL0
- SYS_AMEVCNTR0_INST_RET_EL0
- SYS_AMEVCNTR0_MEM_STALL_EL0
Auxiliary platform specific counters can be accessed using
SYS_AMEVCNTR1_EL0(n), where n is a value between 0 and 15.
Details can be found in: arch/arm64/include/asm/sysreg.h.
Userspace access
----------------
Currently, access from userspace to the AMU registers is disabled due to:
- Security reasons: they might expose information about code executed in
secure mode.
- Purpose: AMU counters are intended for system management use.
Also, the presence of the feature is not visible to userspace.
Virtualization
--------------
Currently, access from userspace (EL0) and kernelspace (EL1) on the KVM
guest side is disabled due to:
- Security reasons: they might expose information about code executed
by other guests or the host.
Any attempt to access the AMU registers will result in an UNDEFINED
exception being injected into the guest.
......@@ -248,6 +248,20 @@ Before jumping into the kernel, the following conditions must be met:
- HCR_EL2.APK (bit 40) must be initialised to 0b1
- HCR_EL2.API (bit 41) must be initialised to 0b1
For CPUs with Activity Monitors Unit v1 (AMUv1) extension present:
- If EL3 is present:
CPTR_EL3.TAM (bit 30) must be initialised to 0b0
CPTR_EL2.TAM (bit 30) must be initialised to 0b0
AMCNTENSET0_EL0 must be initialised to 0b1111
AMCNTENSET1_EL0 must be initialised to a platform specific value
having 0b1 set for the corresponding bit for each of the auxiliary
counters present.
- If the kernel is entered at EL1:
AMCNTENSET0_EL0 must be initialised to 0b1111
AMCNTENSET1_EL0 must be initialised to a platform specific value
having 0b1 set for the corresponding bit for each of the auxiliary
counters present.
The requirements described above for CPU mode, caches, MMUs, architected
timers, coherency and system registers apply to all CPUs. All CPUs must
enter the kernel in the same exception level.
......
......@@ -6,6 +6,7 @@ ARM64 Architecture
:maxdepth: 1
acpi_object_usage
amu
arm-acpi
booting
cpu-feature-registers
......
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