ARM Cortex-A8: How to measure cache usage?

Question

I have Freescale i.MX515EVK, the ARM Cortex-A8 / Ubuntu platform with me, unfortunately, the Linux kernel on the board does not support some of the well-known profilers, such as Oprofiler or Zoom Profiler (Zoom supports ARM processors, but internally it uses Oprofiler driver), which give very detailed cache usage reports.

The Cortex-A8 has 32 KB of instruction and data caches and a 256 KB L2 cache. Currently, when my image processing algorithm works, I am completely blinded by their use.

Are there any other methods besides using profilers to search for cache deletions and omissions?

Answer 1

Install Valgrind (it now supports ARM) and use the cachegrind tool to verify cache usage. If you use Ubuntu on a device, it should be as simple as sudo apt-get install valgrind. Valgrind will also help you simulate what happens with different cache sizes.