Subject: [PATCH v2] ARM: perf: save/restore pmu registers in pm notifier

From: [email-masked] (Will Deacon)
Date: Tue, 15 Apr 2014 09:47:50 +0100

Hello,

On Mon, Apr 14, 2014 at 02:42:22AM +0100, Neil Zhang wrote:
> From: Sudeep KarkadaNagesha <[email-masked]>
> 
> This adds core support for saving and restoring CPU PMU registers
> for suspend/resume support i.e. deeper C-states in cpuidle terms.
> This patch adds support only to ARMv7 PMU registers save/restore.
> It needs to be extended to xscale and ARMv6 if needed.
> 
> [Neil] We found that DS-5 not work on our CA7 based SoCs.
> After debuging, found PMU registers were lost because of core power down.
> Then i found Sudeep had a patch to fix it about two years ago but not in
> the mainline, just port it.

What I don't like about this patch is that we're introducing significant
overhead for SoCs that don't require save/restore of the PMU state. I'd much
rather see core power down disabled whilst the PMU is in use but, if that's
not possible, then I think we need to:

 (1) Make this conditional for cores that really need it

 (2) Only save/restore if the PMU is in use (even better, just save/restore
     the live registers, but that's probably not worth the effort
     initially).

 (3) Ensure we ->reset the PMU before doing the restore

Will