Actually, digging through two year old emails, the TI Landing team said of CONFIG_PERF_EVENTS "We turned this off in part to avoid errata in the core for which we have no workaround."
Now gator has an #error if this isn't enabled because it expects to use this feature, though it does compile and works - with much reduced functionality - if this config isn't available. So as a compromise, I downgraded the #error to a #warning and didn't make the KConfig for Gator depend on {HW_}PERF_EVENTS.
Looking at the config fragments I see that omap4.conf doesn't disable the {HW_}PERF_EVENTS configs set in linaro-base.conf so it is in fact now not hitting this code #error/#warning lines anyway.
So I would say that this hack should go now and I'll update the KConfig for gator to depend on the right configs to avoid the #error.
For LSK, I'll probably leave this change until the next Gator release, as it's not doing any harm at the moment.
Got it. It's OK for me.