Re: [PATCH] x86: add the debugfs interface for the sysprof tool

[Soeren Sandmann <sandmann@daimi.au.dk>]

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