OProfile documentation

Manuals

The manuals listed below are intended for three different audiences:

OProfile manual, for all OProfile users
OProfile internals, for OProfile contributors and those who are curious about the inner workings of OProfile
OProfile JIT agent developer guide, for OProfile-JIT agent library developers wanting to extend the profiling capabilities to support new virtual machines

Your 4-step plan to profiling.

Compile and install oprofile, making sure to use --with-linux option to point to your current kernel source, or --with-kernel-support for 2.6 kernels.
Start up the profiler :
opcontrol --vmlinux=/path/to/vmlinux opcontrol --start
Now the profiler is running, go do what ever you want to profile.
Now let's generate a profile summary :
opreport -l /path/to/mybinary
Or, if we built our binary with -g, we can produce some annotated source :
opannotate --source --output-dir=/path/to/annotated-source /path/to/mybinary
Or we can look at the rankings of the various system components as a whole :
opreport

If you reinstall Oprofile over a previous version you need, before starting the profiler, to:

opcontrol --reset

A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence. - David Hume

2008/09/23