NVIDIA Performance Counters Headed To Linux 4.2

The DRM subsystem pull for the Linux 4.2 kernel is nothing short of huge. There's some more work to talk about today.

The DRM updates for Linux 4.2 has the new AMDGPU DRM driver, the new VirtIO DRM driver, atomic mode-setting for OMAP, Adreno A306 support, many Intel improvements, and VCE 1.0 video encode for the Radeon driver. Now the latest addition is the performance counter support within the Nouveau driver for NVIDIA hardware.

With Linux 4.2, Nouveau provides user-space support for monitoring compute and graphics counters for Tesla and compute counters on Fermi. Support for performance counters for other hardware generations is still being worked on and for some more reverse-engineering under Windows will be needed. These counters benefit application/game developers and others and will be exposed via the Gallium3D HUD and the GL_AMD_performance_monitor OpenGL extension.

More details can be found via Samuel Pitoiset's blog, the student developer spearheading this Nouveau performance counter work over the past few years for providing NVIDIA PerfKit-like functionality under Linux.