API for Performance Monitoring in Embedded Multicore Systems
Giovani Gracioli, Antônio Augusto Fröhlich · 2011
Hardware Performance Counters (HPCs) are special registers available in the most modern processors that can be used to monitor shared hardware resources in multicore processors. Specifically for embedded real-time applications running on a multicore processor, such shared resources can affect their performance and cause deadline misses. This paper presents a hardware performance counter interface designed to embedded systems. The use of the interface is demonstrated through a benchmark that shares data between two threads executing in different cores of a multicore processor. As a result, the operating system can obtain an accurate view of software's behavior.