perf_event: Provide vmalloc() based mmap() backing

Some architectures such as Sparc, ARM and MIPS (basically
everything with flush_dcache_page()) need to deal with dcache
aliases by carefully placing pages in both kernel and user maps.

These architectures typically have to use vmalloc_user() for this.

However, on other architectures, vmalloc() is not needed and has
the downsides of being more restricted and slower than regular
allocations.

Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Acked-by: David Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Jens Axboe <jens.axboe@oracle.com>
Cc: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
LKML-Reference: <1254830228.21044.272.camel@laptop>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>

1 files changed, 3 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/tools/perf/design.txt b/tools/perf/design.txt
index f1946d107b10..fdd42a824c98 100644
--- a/tools/perf/design.txt
+++ b/tools/perf/design.txt
@@ -455,3 +455,6 @@ will need at least this:
 
 If your architecture does have hardware capabilities, you can override the
 weak stub hw_perf_event_init() to register hardware counters.
+
+Architectures that have d-cache aliassing issues, such as Sparc and ARM,
+should select PERF_USE_VMALLOC in order to avoid these for perf mmap().