[PATCH v8 00/22] Add Counter delegation ISA extension support
From: Atish Patra <atish.patra@linux.dev>
Date: 2026-07-01 08:47:33
Also in:
linux-arm-kernel, linux-devicetree, linux-riscv, lkml
This series adds the counter delegation extension support. It is based on very early PoC work done by Kevin Xue and mostly rewritten after that. The counter delegation ISA extension(Smcdeleg/Ssccfg) actually depends on multiple ISA extensions. 1. S[m|s]csrind : The indirect CSR extension[1] which defines additional 5 ([M|S|VS]IREG2-[M|S|VS]IREG6) register to address size limitation of RISC-V CSR address space. 2. Smstateen: The stateen bit[60] controls the access to the registers indirectly via the above indirect registers. 3. Smcdeleg/Ssccfg: The counter delegation extensions[2] The counter delegation extension allows Supervisor mode to program the hpmevent and hpmcounters directly without needing the assistance from the M-mode via SBI calls. This results in a faster perf profiling and very few traps. This extension also introduces a scountinhibit CSR which allows to stop/start any counter directly from the S-mode. As the counter delegation extension potentially can have more than 100 CSRs, the specification leverages the indirect CSR extension to save the precious CSR address range. Due to the dependency of these extensions, the following extensions must be enabled in qemu to use the counter delegation feature in S-mode. "smstateen=true,sscofpmf=true,ssccfg=true,smcdeleg=true,smcsrind=true,sscsrind=true" or Virt machine users can just "max" cpu instead. When we access the counters directly in S-mode, we also need to solve the following problems. 1. Event to counter mapping 2. Event encoding discovery The RISC-V ISA doesn't define any standard either for event encoding or the event to counter mapping rules. Until now, the SBI PMU implementation relies on device tree binding[3] to discover the event to counter mapping in RISC-V platform in the firmware. The SBI PMU specification[4] defines event encoding for standard perf events as well. Thus, the kernel can query the appropriate counter for an given event from the firmware. However, the kernel doesn't need any firmware interaction for hardware counters if counter delegation is available in the hardware. Thus, the driver needs to discover the above mappings/encodings by itself without any assistance from firmware. Solution to Problem #1: This patch series solves the above problem #1 by extending the perf tool in a way so that event json file can specify the counter constraints of each event and that can be passed to the driver to choose the best counter for a given event. This series introduces a RISC-V specific event field in "CounterIDMask" in event_fields that describes a bitmask of counters supported for a specific eventi. This is the similar approach for few other existing properties in the event_fields which were used by single architecture as well. The counter constraint bitmap is passed to the perf driver via newly introduced "counterid_mask" property set in "config2". The platform vendor have these three ways to encode/use the platform specific events. 1. Directly in driver with appropriate constraints (discouraged due to bloating of the driver) 2. Encode in Json with with CounterIDMask field (preferred as it is contained within platform specific json file) 3. Directly pass counterid_mask at while invoking perf cpu/event=<code>,counterid_mask=<mask>/ The last two patches show cases these use cases and not intended for merging. Solution to problem #2: The event encoding can come from the json or commandline as well. The Qemu patches are available in upstream now. The Linux kernel patches can be found here: https://github.com/atishp04/linux/tree/b4/counter_delegation_v8 [1] https://github.com/riscv/riscv-indirect-csr-access [2] https://github.com/riscv/riscv-smcdeleg-ssccfg [3] https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/devicetree/bindings/perf/riscv%2Cpmu.yaml [4] https://github.com/riscv-non-isa/riscv-sbi-doc/blob/master/src/ext-pmu.adoc [5] https://lore.kernel.org/qemu-devel/20260625-marchid-v2-1-3821c351028b@gmail.com/ (local) To: Paul Walmsley <pjw@kernel.org> To: Rob Herring <robh@kernel.org> To: Krzysztof Kozlowski <krzk+dt@kernel.org> To: Will Deacon <will@kernel.org> To: Mark Rutland <mark.rutland@arm.com> To: Atish Patra <atish.patra@linux.dev> To: Anup Patel <anup@brainfault.org> To: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@kernel.org> To: Namhyung Kim <namhyung@kernel.org> To: Jiri Olsa <jolsa@kernel.org> To: Ian Rogers <irogers@google.com> To: James Clark <james.clark@linaro.org> Cc: linux-riscv@lists.infradead.org Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Cc: Conor Dooley <conor@kernel.org> Cc: devicetree@vger.kernel.org Cc: linux-arm-kernel@lists.infradead.org Cc: linux-perf-users@vger.kernel.org Signed-off-by: Atish Patra <redacted> Changes in v8: - Fixed few more issues reported by Sashiko. Remaining sashiko reviews are moot. - Added support for Qemu ARCH ID 0x42 introduced by the qemu patch[5] - Link to v7: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20260622-counter_delegation-v7-0-0ba2fd34614e@meta.com (local) Changes in v7: - Fixed various issues pointed by Sashiko. - Rebased on top of v7.1 - Added a separate patch to fix various memory leak issues in probe error path - Link to v6: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20260608-counter_delegation-v6-0-285b72ed65a9@meta.com (local) Changes in v6: - Reverted the file name changes as suggested by Will. Now pmu-sbi.c will continue to support both counter delegation and SBI PMU with different function prefixes. - No longer depends up old upstream patch for reusing the Counter property to encode event to counter mapping property. It directly uses additional field in json event fields similar to other architectures. - Added few test patches (not intended for upstreaming) to show case different possibilities of providing mapping/event encodings. - Fixed review comments and miscellenous minor typos/fixes on v5 - Rebased on top of v7.1-rc6 Changes in v5: - Fixed dt_binding_check errors. - Added the ISA extension dependancy for counter delegation extensions. - Replaced the boolean variables with static key conditional check required at boot time. - Miscellaneous minor code restructuring. - Link to v4: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20250205-counter_delegation-v4-0-835cfa88e3b1@rivosinc.com (local) Changes in v4: - Added ISA dependencies as per dt schema instead of description. - Fixed few compilation issues due to patch reordering in v3. - Link to v3: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20250127-counter_delegation-v3-0-64894d7e16d5@rivosinc.com (local) Changes in v3: - Fixed the dtb binding check failures. - Inlcuded the fix reported by Rajnesh Kanwal for guest counter overflow. - Rearranged the overflow handling more efficiently for better modularity. - Link to v2: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20250114-counter_delegation-v2-0-8ba74cdb851b@rivosinc.com (local) Changes in v2: - Dropped architecture specific overrides for event encoding. - Dropped hwprobe bits. - Added a vendor specific event encoding table to support vendor specific event encoding and counter mapping. - Fixed few bugs and cleanup. - Link to v1: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20240217005738.3744121-1-atishp@rivosinc.com (local) --- Atish Patra (19): RISC-V: perf: fix resource cleanup on driver probe failure RISC-V: Add Sxcsrind ISA extension definition and parsing dt-bindings: riscv: add Sxcsrind ISA extension description RISC-V: Define indirect CSR access helpers RISC-V: Add Smcntrpmf extension parsing dt-bindings: riscv: add Smcntrpmf ISA extension description RISC-V: Add Ssccfg/Smcdeleg ISA extension definition and parsing dt-bindings: riscv: add Counter delegation ISA extensions description RISC-V: perf: Restructure the SBI PMU code RISC-V: perf: Modify the counter discovery mechanism RISC-V: perf: Add a mechanism to defined legacy event encoding RISC-V: perf: Implement supervisor counter delegation support RISC-V: perf: Use config2/vendor table for event to counter mapping RISC-V: perf: Add legacy event encodings via sysfs RISC-V: perf: Add Qemu virt machine events tools/perf: Support event code for arch standard events tools/perf: Add RISC-V CounterIDMask event field TEST(do-not-upstream): fake qemu-virt PMU events for cdeleg counter-mask testing TEST(do-not-upstream): fake qemu vendor JSON + mapfile entry for CounterIDMask path Charlie Jenkins (1): RISC-V: perf: Skip PMU SBI extension when not implemented Kaiwen Xue (2): RISC-V: Add Sxcsrind ISA extension CSR definitions RISC-V: Add Sscfg extension CSR definition .../devicetree/bindings/riscv/extensions.yaml | 63 ++ arch/riscv/include/asm/csr.h | 49 + arch/riscv/include/asm/csr_ind.h | 41 + arch/riscv/include/asm/hwcap.h | 7 + arch/riscv/include/asm/vendorid_list.h | 6 + arch/riscv/kernel/cpufeature.c | 27 + drivers/perf/Kconfig | 14 +- drivers/perf/riscv_pmu_sbi.c | 1116 ++++++++++++++++---- include/linux/perf/riscv_pmu.h | 5 + .../perf/pmu-events/arch/riscv/arch-standard.json | 10 + tools/perf/pmu-events/arch/riscv/mapfile.csv | 2 + .../pmu-events/arch/riscv/qemu/virt/events.json | 26 + tools/perf/pmu-events/jevents.py | 10 +- 13 files changed, 1167 insertions(+), 209 deletions(-) --- base-commit: 8cd9520d35a6c38db6567e97dd93b1f11f185dc6 change-id: 20240715-counter_delegation-628a32f8c9cc Best regards, -- Atish Patra [off-list ref]