Nouveau Patches Under Review To Expose Global Performance Counters

Samuel Pitoiset has continued on his quest of implementing NVIDIA hardware counters support and exposing it to user-space within the Nouveau open-source driver stack.

Samuel recently implemented NVPerfKit over Gallium3D and GL_AMD_performance_monitor support for reporting NVIDIA performance counters via this driver. Up to now the performance counters exposed to user-space via these methods have been the NVIDIA MP counters while Pitoiset now has patches under review for the global performance counters.

A set of 20 patches published today for commenting expose the global performance counters (PCOUNTERs) to user-space via the nvif interface. Initially the PCOUNTERs are exposed for the NV50 class hardware while it will be similar to implement for more-modern NVIDIA Fermi and Kepler families too. Those Kepler/Fermi patches are expected once these initial 20 patches have been reviewed.

More info on the work via this patch series. The work might be coming in too late to be squeezed into DRM-Next for Linux 4.2, but otherwise then it's some Linux 4.3 work to look forward to later in the year.