I'm developing performance sensitive code for an embedded platform. In general, there are multiple ways to test for an embedded platform, and I'm doing so by developing on a full Linux machine, using the qemu-user arm mode as an emulator. I have full unit tests working, and now want to address performance.

I'd like to profile or benchmark my code. Now, doing so directly in qemu-user is silly, because a fast op may be emulated slowly. But, in principle, qemu could tell me how many clock cycles were emulated to run a function. Even if this doesn't have a full model, or even a partial model, of cache, mem latency, etc., it will still be very useful.

Is there a way I can use qemu to tell me some sense of how code A will perform vs code B? If not, is there another tool? (I recall Intel having some type of model which will tell you how fast given asm will execute.) In general, in the absence of an embedded platform with profiling tools, how can I benchmark and profile my code for ultimate performance?