Does Android(on ARM) have the hardware performance counters?

Question

So like in Linux on Intel processor, we have a large amount of hardware performance counters to access. Like previously, using a user-space software called perfmon2, I could get values of cache miss rate, CPU stalling cycles due to some reason(e.g,. L1 cache miss) and etc.

My question is , do we have those stuff in Android? Since it's based on ARM, I do not think we have as strong performance monitor counter support as we have in x86, right?

Answer 1

ARM11 and Cortex-A/R do have hardware performance counters. You can check that on the official ARM website on this page: http://infocenter.arm.com/help/index.jsp?topic=/com.arm.doc.faqs/ka4237.html

Since Android is also running on top of Linux, you can access performance counters through user-space software via the "Perf Events" subsystem. However, you will need to write native C code, which includes "perf_event.h" and build it using the Android NDK. Before you start writing code, I suggest you take a look at this project: platform/external/linux-tools-perf (https://android.googlesource.com/platform/external/linux-tools-perf/), which may be exactly what you are looking for. I don't know about any alternatives which allow doing this directly from Java Code.