Enable Arm SPE for Performix memory access analysis

Who is this for?

This is an introductory topic for software developers and performance engineers who want to prepare Arm Linux machines, including cloud-hosted systems, for Arm Performix memory access profiling.

What will you learn?

Upon completion of this Learning Path, you will be able to:

• Check whether Arm Statistical Profiling Extension (SPE) is already available on an Arm Linux system using Sysreport and kernel-level checks.
• Explain the hardware, platform, and kernel requirements that allow Linux to expose the SPE driver.
• Apply Linux-side changes such as loading the SPE PMU module, installing matching kernel modules, or selecting an OS/kernel with SPE support.
• Identify when a cloud instance does not expose SPE to the guest OS and choose a suitable system for Arm Performix memory access analysis.

Prerequisites

Before starting, you will need the following:

• Access to a Linux-based Arm bare-metal system with sudo or root access, such as an Arm AGI CPU platform that exposes SPE. Cloud VMs typically don’t expose SPE to guest operating systems. Use a bare-metal (metal) instance from your cloud provider instead.
• Access to Arm Performix on your host machine and SSH access to the target system. For setup instructions, see the Arm Performix install guide .
• Familiarity with the Linux command line and SSH.