Reading up on TPTP & playing with OProfile on FC4
I’ve recently started reading the TPTP specifications and AgentController APIs that will allow me to integrate Eclipse-OProfile with the Eclipse TPTP framework. I’ve also been playing around with OProfile on my FC4 box lately and trying to become more familiar with OProfile and its internals.
Interestingly, OProfile will only work on my machine in timer interrupt mode. I’m not sure why that is; it’s a first-generation P4 and I’ve successfully used OProfile on this box with previous Linux installs and didn’t have to fall back on timer interrupts. No biggie though. I’m actually thinking of just starting with timer interrupts as the base event supported in this new Eclipse-OProfile and design around supporting CPU-specific events in the future. Even timer interrupt mode is quite powerful; we can present great profiling data at the source level, callgraph data, system-wide at a low overhead and with zero instrumentation. OProfile really is a great tool and I’m pretty sure we can put an easy-to-use, powerful UI on top of it.
So far I’ve been relatively impressed with the TPTP specification. It’s a crisp spec, which is great, but I just hope it’s going to be flexible enough for the things I need it to do. One thing that I’m worried about is how I’ll get it to handle root authentication when doing opcontrol --init. Furthermore, it would be awesome to leverage TPTP’s distributed design to be able to profile remote hosts, but that seems pretty much impossible given that OProfile runs in kernel space.