Arm SPE Prerequisites

The Arm Statistical Profiling Extension (SPE) is an optional feature in Arm®v8.2 and is present in CPUs, such as the Neoverse™ N1 and V1. In addition, using this Linaro MAP feature has the following prerequisites:

• Use Linux kernel 5.12 or later to support detecting SVE predicate events. Non-SVE events only require 4.16 or later. To confirm that basic support is available, check for the path /sys/bus/event_source/devices/arm_spe_XX.

• For kernel versions 4.20 to 5.1-RC5, apply the patch at https://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1903.3/06760.html.

• Disable kernel page table isolation for the target. To ensure that kernel page table isolation is disabled, boot the machine with the command-line argument kpti=off.