Nowadays GPUs are utilized for both graphics rendering and general-purpose compute (GPGPU). For the latter, CUDA is the indisputable leading solution. Though, with so many other GPU vendors, the quest for a GPGPU standard never stops. OpenCL was a great attempt and is used widely; but still it falls short on many aspects. Given the success of Vulkan in graphics and it being both a graphics and compute API, one would wonder whether it can actually be the next-generation GPGPU standard. I certainly believe so; but the road is not full of roses.
In a previous blog post I gave a general introduction to GPU driver internals in Android/Linux systems. Following up with it, today I will explain how a specific functionality, hardware performance counter (perf counter) queries, is handled in both Qualcomm Adreno and ARM Mali drivers, by walking through the kernel driver source code.
Recently I have been working on a library that needs to directly interact with GPU kernel drivers from various vendors on Android/Linux systems. Compared to various GPU APIs, information at this level is quite sparse; so it is not a straightforward task, to say the least, and ends up requiring me to piece multiple sources together to figure out the details. So I am logging these driver internals and resources down in case it can be useful to others that are interested in these low-level bits.
