To: John Levon <levon@movementarian.org>
Cc: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>, Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>,
       Arjan van de Ven <arjan@infradead.org>, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org,
       tglx@tglx.de, hpa@zytor.com
Subject: Re: [PATCH] x86: add the debugfs interface for the sysprof tool
References: <20080219123756.6261c13c@laptopd505.fenrus.org>
	<20080223001130.d8922136.akpm@linux-foundation.org>
	<20080223113724.GB31304@elte.hu>
	<20080223135335.GA28464@totally.trollied.org.uk>
From: Soeren Sandmann <sandmann@daimi.au.dk>
Date: 23 Feb 2008 21:15:52 +0100
In-Reply-To: <20080223135335.GA28464@totally.trollied.org.uk>
Message-ID: <ye8ejb3e8ef.fsf@camel10.daimi.au.dk>
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John Levon <levon@movementarian.org> writes:

> Soren wrote sysprof when he tried an earlier version of oprofile and
> found it slightly non-obvious. Instead of doing any of these things:

This is not accurate. Sysprof started by me adding a hierarchical call
view to speedprof, a SIGPROF profiler which was basically a hack in
memprof.

Oprofile did not work on my system at the time (Red Hat 9, I believe),
and the website said that I had to apply a patch to the kernel and
recompile, so I didn't try it.

The hierarchical call view in speedprof worked out so well that I
wrote a simple kernel module to produce system-wide stacktraces, and
fed them into speedprof. Since speedprof was just a hack in memprof, I
wrote a new GUI, and sysprof was born.

It was only later I tried oprofile and found it not only much more
difficult to use, but also much less useful when I did get it to work.


Soren
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