oprofile - a system-wide profiler

opcontrol [ options ]

opreport [ options ] [ profile specification ]

opannotate [ options ] [ profile specification ]

oparchive [ options ] [ profile specification ]

opgprof [ options ] [ profile specification ]

OProfile is a profiling system for systems running Linux 2.2, 2.4, and 2.6. Profiling runs transparently in the background and profile data can be collected at any time. OProfile makes use of the hardware performance counters provided on Intel, AMD, and other processors, and uses a timer-interrupt based mechanism on CPUs without counters. OProfile can profile the whole system in high detail.

For a gentle guide to using OProfile, please read the HTML documentation listed in SEE ALSO.

opcontrol is used for starting and stopping the OProfile daemon, and providing set-up parameters.

opreport gives image and symbol-based profile summaries for the whole system or a subset of binary images.

opannotate can produce annotated source or mixed source and assembly output.

oparchive produces oprofile archive for offline analysis

opgprof can produce a gprof-format profile for a single binary.

All of the post-profiling tools can take profile specifications, which is some combination of the following parameters. Enclosing part of a profile specification in curly braces { } can be used for differential profiles with opreport

session:sessionlist

A comma-separated list of session names to resolve in. Absence of this tag, unlike all others, means "the current session", equivalent to specifying "session:current".

session-exclude:sessionlist

A comma-separated list of sessions to exclude.

image:imagelist

A comma-separated list of image names to resolve. Each entry may be relative path, glob-style name, or full path, e.g. opreport 'image:/usr/bin/oprofiled,*op*,./oprofpp'

image-exclude:imagelist

Same as image:, but the matching images are excluded.

lib-image:imagelist

Same as image:, but only for images that are for a particular primary binary image (namely, an application). This only makes sense to use if you're using --separate. This includes kernel modules and the kernel when using --separate=kernel.

lib-image-exclude:imagelist

Same as <option>lib-image:</option>, but the matching images are excluded.

event:eventname

The symbolic event name to match on, e.g. event:DATA_MEM_REFS.

count:eventcount

The event count to match on, e.g. event:DATA_MEM_REFS count:30000.

unit-mask:maskvalue

The unit mask value of the event to match on, e.g. unit-mask:1.

cpu:cpulist

Only consider profiles for the given numbered CPU (starting from zero). This is only useful when using CPU profile separation.

tgid:pidlist

Only consider profiles for the given task groups. Unless some program is using threads, the task group ID of a process is the same as its process ID. This option corresponds to the POSIX notion of a thread group. This is only useful when using per-process profile separation.

tid:tidlist

Only consider profiles for the given threads. When using recent thread libraries, all threads in a process share the same task group ID, but have different thread IDs. You can use this option in combination with tgid: to restrict the results to particular threads within a process. This is only useful when using per-process profile separation.

No special environment variables are recognised by oprofile.

$HOME/.oprofile/

Configuration files

/root/.oprofile/daemonrc

Configuration file for opcontrol

/usr/share/oprofile/

Event description files used by OProfile.

/var/lib/oprofile/oprofiled.log

The user-space daemon logfile.

/var/lib/oprofile/opdev, /var/lib/oprofile/ophashmapdev, /var/lib/oprofile/opnotedev

The device files for communication with the Linux 2.4 kernel module.

/dev/oprofile

The device filesystem for communication with the Linux 2.6 kernel module.

/var/lib/oprofile/samples/

The location of the generated sample files.

This man page is current for oprofile-0.9.1.

/usr/share/doc/oprofile/, opcontrol(1), opreport(1), opannotate(1), oparchive(1), opgprof(1), gprof(1), readprofile(1), CPU vendor architecture manuals

oprofile is Copyright (C) 1998-2004 University of Manchester, UK, John Levon, and others. OProfile is released under the GNU General Public License, Version 2, or (at your option) any later version.

John Levon <levon@movementarian.org> is the primary author. See the documentation for other contributors.