In the Streamline documentation, there is a constant mention of gator. Can someone please explain what is this gator and what is the link between it and the Streamline?
What is gator? What is the link between ARM DS-5 streamline and gator?
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From chapter 1 of the user guide:
...To get started using it, you must configure your target and ensure that gator, the mechanism that Streamline uses to communicate with your target, is running on the target.
Performance data does not, naturally, aggregate and move around by itself; mostly it just appears briefly in PMU registers, then vanishes into the æther, never to be seen again. We, as the user, need to do something to capture it. If we were doing self-hosted profiling on the target system itself, we might use something like perf tools to record the data locally and analyse it. If we instead want that data collected and spat out via some communication protocol to analyse with Streamline running on a different host system, we need to run something else on the target system that will do that job for us. Gator is that thing.
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Gator runs on the target platform to collect performance monitoring stats and expose them to the external tool (Streamline) that presents them. Gator consists of a kernel module and a user space daemon. The kernel module periodically scrapes the stats from the processor's performance monitor unit (PMU). The user space daemon is what the external tool connects to in order to retrieve the PMU data. One benefit of using gator is that it does not require specialized hardware (e.g. an ICE) to collect performance data.
Gator may run in kernel space or user space mode. More information available here