Oprofile for IBM SDK 3.1

OProfile is a system-wide profiler for Linux systems, capable of profiling all running code at low overhead. OProfile is released under the GNU GPL. It consists of a kernel driver and a daemon for collecting sample data, and several post-profiling tools for turning data into information. OProfile leverages the hardware performance counters of the CPU to enable profiling of a wide variety of interesting statistics, which can also be used for basic time-spent profiling. All code is profiled: hardware and software interrupt handlers, kernel modules, the kernel, shared libraries, and applications.

The current SDK 3.1 version of OProfile for Cell/B.E. supports profiling on the POWER processor events and SPU cycle profiling. These events include cycles as well as the various processor, cache and memory events. It is possible to profile on up to four events simultaneously on the Cell BE system but there are restrictions on which of the PPU events can be measured simultaneously. When using SPU cycle profiling, events must be within the same group due to restrictions in the underlying hardware support for the performance counters. You can use the opcontrol –list-events command to view the events and which group contains each event.

The Programmer's Guide to the IBM SDK for Multicore Acceleration contains some information about the current SDK 3.1 release of Oprofile for Cell/B.E..

How to use OProfile and the post-processing tool is described in the user manual available at http://oprofile.sourceforge.net/doc/

Binary packages

If you are installing on IBM BladeCenter hardware, the SDK version of OProfile must be manually installed. Install OProfile by typing the following commands as root:

                  rpm -e --nodeps oprofile
                  rpm -ivh oprofile-0.9.4-2.bsc.ppc.rpm

Source files

To rebuild the Oprofile rpms you can install the source rpm and run the rpm_build.sh script:

                  rpm -ivh oprofile-0.9.4-2.bsc.src.rpm
                  rpm_build.sh --none --oprofile