NV50 Global Performance Counters For Nouveau

Written by Michael Larabel in Nouveau on 23 June 2015 at 12:04 PM EDT. 4 Comments
NOUVEAU
Samuel Pitoiset has continued reverse-engineering NVIDIA's hardware performance counters and implementing them for use under Linux by the open-source Nouveau driver. His latest "RFC" patches are for exposing the NV50 global performance counters.

Samuel Pitoiset has been focusing on this performance counter work for quite a while and on Monday posted eight new patches. His announcement explains, "This series exposes NVIDIA's global performance counters for Tesla through the Gallium's HUD and the GL_AMD_performance_monitor extension. This adds support for 24 hardware events which have been reverse engineered with PerfKit (Windows) and CUPTI (Linux). These hardware events will allow developers to profile OpenGL applications. To reduce latency and to improve accuracy, these global performance counters are tied to the command stream of the GPU using a set of software methods instead of ioctls. Results are then written by the kernel to a mapped notifier buffer object that allows the userspace to read back them."

This work depends on updated Mesa code and libdrm with the DRM kernel driver code being squared away. Patches will follow this NV50 support for exposing global performance counters on NVIDIA Fermi and Kepler graphics processors.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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