OProfile is a powerful system-wide profiler for Linux. Read
more at http://oprofile.sf.net

OProfile 0.8.1 has been released. OProfile is still in alpha,
but has been proven stable for many users.

New features
------------

A new utility, oparchive, has been included. This allows you to
save all or part of a profile session, including the profiled
binaries; the archive can be processed later via the "archive:"
profile specifier.

The profile specifiers "sample-file:" and "binary:" have been
removed; oparchive is a more flexible solution to the problem.

Objective C debug info is now handled.

Bug fixes
---------

The post-profiling tools work on x86-64 again.

Using the "--merge lib" option now works again.

When using an output directory, it was possible for opannotate
to write to a file outside the directory. This has been fixed,
and some further safety checks have been added.

A problem where over-writing binaries can in some cases cause oprofiled
to abort has been fixed (bug #931871).

Events with code 0x00 were not handled properly on some platforms
(bug #964097). A fix can be found in kernels released after 2.6.8.1

A bug that could cause a failure when reading debug info has been fixed.

Known problems
--------------

On IA-64, some firmware revisions cause problems with OProfile (bug #931883).

The x86-64 port for 2.4 kernels seems to be broken (bug #840915).

Power management on laptops can be incompatible with OProfile in 2.4 (bug #554927).

Many Alpha ev67 events do not work (bug #931875).

A few Pentium IV events do not work (bug #841099).

The pre-emptable kernel option is not supported in 2.4 (bug #478516).

Reading call-graph profiles can sometimes fail (bug #971487).

nosmp is not supported in kernels before 2.4.10 (bug #463087).

For 2.2 kernels, the module must be compiled as the same user
that owns the kernel source tree.