I have a dragonboard 410c rather than the HiKey board. However, on the dragonboard 410c I have been able to access the pmu using the linux perf command:
$ perf stat true
failed to read counter stalled-cycles-frontend
failed to read counter stalled-cycles-backend
failed to read counter branches
Performance counter stats for ‘true’:
1.899635 task-clock (msec) # 0.074 CPUs utilized
2 context-switches # 0.001 M/sec
0 cpu-migrations # 0.000 K/sec
27 page-faults # 0.014 M/sec
2,256,371 cycles # 1.188 GHz
<not supported> stalled-cycles-frontend
<not supported> stalled-cycles-backend
836,772 instructions # 0.37 insns per cycle
<not supported> branches
12,914 branch-misses # 0.00% of all branches
0.025573807 seconds time elapsed
Since the HiKey board is also Cortex A53 based I would image it is likely to work the same. It will mainly depend on whether the kernel has the perf infrastructure enabled. The kernel config should have:
CONFIG_HAVE_PERF_EVENTS=y
CONFIG_PERF_EVENTS=y
CONFIG_HW_PERF_EVENTS=y
When the kernel boots up should see something like the following in the console log output:
hw perfevents: enabled with arm/armv8-pmuv3 PMU driver, 7 counters available