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. 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.