ARM DS-5 - Creating Custom Performance Counters

Advanced Customizations
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11.2 Creating custom performance counters
In addition to the hardware-specific and Linux performance counters that you can configure
using the Counter Configuration dialog box, the gator daemon and driver provide hooks that
enable you to customize the counters collected during a capture.
Streamline derives its default set of counters from the performance monitoring unit, linux hooks,
and memory-mapped peripherals. You can add your own counters to this list if there is a
hardware metric that you want to track which Streamline does not provide by default.
11.2.1 The gator_events_mmaped.c example file
In the
gator-driver.tar.gz archive distributed with your copy of Streamline is a gator source
file called
gator_events_mmaped.c . The events contained in this file are not included in the
events.xml file and do not appear in the list of available counters in the Counter Configuration
dialog box. This file was provided as an example of how to add custom counters.
Note
You can locate all of the files provided by DS-5 by selecting Help → ARM Extras... from the
main menu.
To familiarize yourself with the process of adding your own counters, incorporate the simulated
examples from
gator_events_mmaped.c into gator .
To do so, follow these steps:
1. Open the
gator_events_mmaped.c sample file in the editor of your choice.
2. Copy the xml from the comments section of
gator_events_mmaped.c .
3. Open
events.xml . This file is only available after you have built the gator daemon. If you
built your gator daemon for a Linux target, it is located in the
build_location/daemon-src
directory. If you built it for Android, it is located in the
build_location/jni directory.
4. Add the copied xml from the comments section of
gator_events_mmaped.c to events.xml,
just after the closing tag of the Linux category.
5. Remove any * comment markers from the copied xml.
6. Save
events.xml .
7. Copy
events.xml to your target. You must place it in the same directory as gatord .
8. Enter
./gatord & on the command line of your target to restart gatord .
9. Open the Counter Configuration dialog in Streamline. Note that a new category,
mmaped, appears with the Sine, Triangle, and PWM simulated counters.
10. Add Sine to list of counters.
11. Run a capture session.
If successful, the waveform generated by the simulated Sine counter appears in the charts
section of the Timeline view.