An Open-Source Version Of NVIDIA's NVPerfKit Continues Coming

As part of the this year's Google Summer of Code, a returning Nouveau developer is working on open-source, reverse-engineered performance counters support for NVIDIA graphics hardware that's implemented within the Nouveau driver stack and exposed to user-space in a similar manner to NVIDIA's NvPerfKit.

Since last year Samuel Pitoiset has been working on reverse-engineering NVIDIA's performance counters found on their modern graphics processors. Samuel is ultimately working towards an open-source version of NVKitPerf-like functionality to aid developers in debugging and optimizing their software on NVIDIA GPUs.

With this year's GSoC, Samuel is mostly working to expose the performance counters to user-space now that he has a understanding of how the hardware counters function. Samuel has written a new blog post to share the latest work he's accomplished this summer. His latest blog post covers how the performance counters (PCOUNTER) work, how some events are handled by NVPerfKit on Windows, etc.

Pitoiset ended the post with, "I have a first prototype which works quite well, I’ll submit it the next week." His post in full about this work can be read on WordPress.