OProfile uses a kernel module that can be compiled for 2.2.11 or later and 2.4. 2.4.10 or above is required if you use the boot-time kernel option nosmp. 2.6 kernels are supported with the in-kernel OProfile driver. Note that only 32-bit x86 and IA64 are supported on 2.2/2.4 kernels.

2.6 kernels are strongly recommended. Under 2.4, OProfile may cause system crashes if power management is used, or the BIOS does not correctly deal with local APICs.

PPC64 processors (Power4/Power5/PPC970, etc.) require a recent (> 2.6.5) kernel with the line #define PV_970 present in include/asm-ppc64/processor.h.

Profiling the Cell Broadband Engine PowerPC Processing Element (PPE) requires a kernel version of 2.6.18 or more recent. Profiling the Cell Broadband Engine Synergistic Processing Element (SPE) requires a kernel version of 2.6.22 or more recent. Additionally, full support of SPE profiling requires a BFD library from binutils code dated January 2007 or later. To ensure the proper BFD support exists, run the configure utility with --with-target=cell-be.

You should have installed modutils 2.4.6 or higher (in fact earlier versions work well in almost all cases).

For Intel IA32, a CPU with either a P6 generation or Pentium 4 core is required. In marketing terms this translates to anything between an Intel Pentium Pro (not Pentium Classics) and a Pentium 4 / Xeon, including all Celerons. The AMD Athlon, and Duron CPUs are also supported. Other IA32 CPU types only support the RTC mode of OProfile; please see later in this manual for details. Hyper-threaded Pentium IVs are not supported in 2.4. For 2.4 kernels, the Intel IA-64 CPUs are also supported. For 2.6 kernels, there is additionally support for Alpha processors, MIPS, ARM, x86-64, sparc64, ppc64, and, in timer mode, PA-RISC and s390.

SMP machines are fully supported.

These libraries are required : popt, bfd, liberty (debian users: libiberty is provided in binutils-dev package), dl, plus the standard C++ libraries.

The use of the GUI to start the profiler requires the Qt 2 library. Qt 3 should also work.

Probably not too strenuous a requirement, but older A.OUT binaries/libraries are not supported.

OK, so it's not really a requirement, but I wish it was...