[Cbe-oss-dev] PS3 performance analysis - errors on loading cellperfctr module

[Carl Love]

I do not believe you will get OProfile to work on the PS3.  It is my
understanding that the PS3 processor is shipped in with the hardware
security enabled.  The hardware security disables the reading of the
program counter.  It is part of the hardware security features to
prevent the reverse engineering of an application.  So, the fact that
the hypervisor support is not there really doesn't matter.  You will
need a PS3 system that does not have the hardware disabled.

The processor in the IBM CELL product is not shipped with the hardware
security enabled hence all the hardware support is enabled so OProfile
works.

On Tue, 2007-12-11 at 15:36 -0800, Geoff Levand wrote:
> Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> > On Tuesday 11 December 2007, Geoff Levand wrote:
> >> The Cell's hardware profiling support is a hypervisor resource, so on PS3
> >> you cannot access those resources directly as you can when Linux is running
> >> on the raw hardware.  The IBM Cell Blade for example runs without a hypervisor,
> >> and it uses cellperfctr.ko.  There currently is no Linux profiling support
> >> on PS3 other than the standard oprofile timer based sampling that the
> >> generic powerpc code provides.
> >> 
> >> In general there is a desire to provide some kind of Cell specific profiling
> >> support for the PS3, but nothing has been announced.
> > 
> > What about the stuff at
> > http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/eranian/linux-2.6.git;a=commitdiff;h=0c39912be3f6cc5df13f107354a97f4bd6c96643
> > 
> > This at least seems to be on a public server. Is that only work in progress,
> > or is it usable to some degree?
> 
> Yes, it is usable, I didn't know it was released yet.
> 
> Yamato-san can you please let us know the status.
> 
> -Geoff
> 
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