A performance monitoring tool suite for 3D graphics SoC application

Nowadays SoC development involves both software and hardware designs. However, the performance bottleneck occurs either in software/hardware or even both. But present performance monitoring tools usually evaluates one of software/hardware performance, which is not quite enough for nowadays SoC designs. Furthermore, due to increasing complexity of user requirements, the embedded OS, such as Linux is introduced to manage the numerous hardware resources for the complicated applications. This paper proposes a performance monitoring tool suite (PMTS) which is capable of analyzing performance of the user program, device driver and system bus for a 3D graphics SoC application under Linux simultaneously. PMTS monitors the bus utilization/contentions and helps the designers to find out the performance bottleneck of both software and hardware efficiently. The experimental result shows that all the software processing time of the 3D graphics SoC application is over 80% of total processing time, which shouldn´t be happened in the 3D graphics SoC environment.