checkasm: use perf API on Linux ARM*

On ARM platforms, accessing the PMU registers requires special user
access permissions. Since there is no other way to get accurate timers,
the current implementation of timers in FFmpeg rely on these registers.
Unfortunately, enabling user access to these registers on Linux is not
trivial, and generally involve compiling a random and unreliable github
kernel module, or patching somehow your kernel.

Such module is very unlikely to reach the upstream anytime soon. Quoting
Robin Murphin from ARM:

> Say you do give userspace direct access to the PMU; now run two or more
> programs at once that believe they can use the counters for their own
> "minimal-overhead" profiling. Have fun interpreting those results...
>
> And that's not even getting into the implications of scheduling across
> different CPUs, CPUidle, etc. where the PMU state is completely beyond
> userspace's control. In general, the plan to provide userspace with
> something which might happen to just about work in a few corner cases,
> but is meaningless, misleading or downright broken in all others, is to
> never do so.

As a result, the alternative is to use the Performance Monitoring Linux
API which makes use of these registers internally (assuming the PMU of
your ARM board is supported in the kernel, which is definitely not a
given...).

While the Linux API is obviously cross platform, it does have a
significant overhead which needs to be taken into account. As a result,
that mode is only weakly enabled on ARM platforms exclusively.

Note on the non flexibility of the implementation: the timers (native
FFmpeg vs Linux API) are selected at compilation time to prevent the
need of function calls, which would result in a negative impact on the
cycle counters.

1 files changed, 3 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/configure b/configure
index 2f3fa2ba3d..a2aad677c8 100755
--- a/configure
+++ b/configure
@@ -448,6 +448,7 @@ Developer options (useful when working on FFmpeg itself):
   --libfuzzer=PATH         path to libfuzzer
   --ignore-tests=TESTS     comma-separated list (without "fate-" prefix
                            in the name) of tests whose result is ignored
+  --enable-linux-perf      enable Linux Performance Monitor API
 
 NOTE: Object files are built at the place where configure is launched.
 EOF
@@ -1699,6 +1700,7 @@ CONFIG_LIST="
     $SUBSYSTEM_LIST
     autodetect
     fontconfig
+    linux_perf
     memory_poisoning
     neon_clobber_test
     ossfuzz
@@ -5015,6 +5017,7 @@ case $target_os in
     linux)
         enable dv1394
         enable section_data_rel_ro
+        enabled_any arm aarch64 && enable_weak linux_perf
         ;;
     irix*)
         target_os=irix