An HTML version of the manual for the current version of OProfile can be found here. There is also an internals manual.
You might want to see some example OProfile output.
Your 4-step plan to profiling.
If you reinstall Oprofile over a previous version you need, before starting the profiler, to:
Quick reference for the available event types for the performance counters. The same
info can be retrieved by running op_help.
ALPHA EV4 (kernel 2.6 only)
ALPHA EV5 (kernel 2.6 only)
ALPHA EV6 (kernel 2.6 only)
ALPHA EV67 (kernel 2.6 only)
AMD Athlon/Duron
AMD64 processors
ARM/XScale PMU1 (kernel >= 2.6.8 only)
ARM/XScale PMU2 (kernel >= 2.6.8 only)
Intel Pentium Pro
Intel Pentium II
Intel Pentium III
Intel P4
Intel P4 with hyperthreading (kernel 2.6 only)
Intel pentium M (P6 core) (kernel >= 2.6.7 only)
Intel IA64 (kernel 2.4 only)
Intel IA64 Itanium (kernel 2.4 only)
Intel IA64 Itanium2 (kernel 2.4 only)
MIPS rm9000 (kernel >= 2.6.11)
ppc e500 (kernel >= 2.6.11 only)
ppc64 POWER4 (kernel >= 2.6.9 only)
ppc64 POWER5 (kernel >= 2.6.9 only)
ppc64 970 (kernel 2.6 only)
The most valuable commodity I know of is information.- Gordon Gekko