AM623: Perf memory usage

Tony Tang

Part Number: AM623

Would like to measure memory usage during a application running, tools perf should be able to do that.

but the perf in SDK doesn't support that from the command returned message

Is there other methold to measure memory usage?

root@am62xx-evm:~# perf mem

 Usage: perf mem [<options>] {record|report}

    -C, --cpu <cpu>       list of cpus to profile
    -f, --force           don't complain, do it
    -p, --phys-data       Record/Report sample physical addresses
    -t, --type <type>     memory operations(load,store) Default load,store
    -v, --verbose         be more verbose (show counter open errors, etc)
        --data-page-size  Record/Report sample data address page size

root@am62xx-evm:~# perf mem -C 1 -f -p -v record
failed: no PMU supports the memory events

1 month ago

0 Bin Liu 1 month ago

TI__Guru**** 182426 points

Hi Tony,

I am not sure this it is true or not, but here is what I found when searching the error message on internet:

The Problem: Cortex-A53 Lacks Arm SPE

perf mem and perf c2c on arm64 rely entirely on a hardware extension called Arm SPE (Statistical Profiling Extension) to sample memory access latencies, load/store paths, and cache misses.
The Cortex-A53 is an older, power-efficient processor design that does not include Arm SPE hardware blocks. SPE was introduced in later ARM architectures (primarily starting with ARMv8.2-A, such as the Cortex-A75, Neoverse-N1, and newer cores).
Because the hardware blocks do not exist on your chip, the Linux kernel cannot expose the memory PMU to perf, leading directly to the no PMU supports the memory events failure.