So I'm fairly new to Armbian (although I have already managed to successfully create a custom build with most of what I need). Sadly, I've very much hit a blocker. I really need to use linux-tools/perf on an RK3588 board with a vendor kernel (I'm using the Mali OpenCL, and the ARM packages are mostly locked) and I need to do some performance tuning. I cannot figure out how to get these tools deployed.
1. There are no linux-tools packages build -- which is fair enough, I'm probably in a minority. Some parts of the tools directories are culled during a cleaning process for the headers, I can see that
2. I am happy to copy over the kernel source and build on the device, but this is a patched vendor kernel. Can I just rsync across `cache/sources/linux-kernel-worktree`? Is that the patched kernel source tree?
3. There are some old allusions in the forums to using armbian-config to get sources -- I'm guessing that's long deprecated
4. Would it be appropriate at some point to create a .deb for the actual kernel sources, just in case -- or even, ideally, the linux-tools packages themselves?
I am very happy to invest effort into helping make this happen, but I am starting from cold into this fairly complex build infrastructure, so any help or pointers I'd be extremely grateful.
I am trying to get the ARM performance assessment setup working (I'm trying to get Mali profiling for OpenCL code) on the Rock 5B+, and I've hit a blocker. The main component to this is some kernel configuration (CONFIG_ARM_SPE_PMU) and a loadable module. Oddly, those work fine in a custom kernel build. What I am hitting appears to be some missing interrupt setup that renders all those components inert. (It has to be a custom build to get CONFIG_ARM_SPE_PMU set. The issue is that even with the kernel configured and the module loaded, the SPE component remains inactive. ARM has its own system report tool which analyzes a setup, and that tool is reporting an issue: And indeed, nothing seems to show in cat /proc/interrupts. The man page for the module suggests this is the issue: It says: KPTI is definitely disabled and the SPE PMU loads (it's in lsmod) but it still doesn’t show in /sys/bus/event_source/devices/. Nothing relevant seemed to show in dmesg either. Frankly, I have no idea where to look for the SPE interrupt, or how to set it up. If anybody has any pointers or suggestions, I'd be extremely grateful.