Linux Distributions Project - OProfile

Overview

The Linux Distributions OProfile plugin aims to bring the powerful call profiling capabilities of OProfile to Eclipse, in a manner that is easy to use for developers of any level of experience. Inexperienced users can, with 1 click, determine the parts of their code which use the most time while experienced users of OProfile can perform the same functions they would on the command-line but with a much more rich visualization of the results.

Current Status

In conjunction with CDT 5.0, the plugin can do the following:

• Launch a local C/C++ application and OProfile simultaneously to start profiling (requires root password to execute OProfile commands)
• Automatically gather OProfile data and display in a tree viewer after a launch
• Configure OProfile to profile several events simultaneously with as many debug registers as the CPU/OProfile supports
• Configure OProfile to profile relevant shared-libraries and/or kernel modules
• Jump to the line-number of the corresponding source file on a double-click of a sample
• Prompt to save the default session on double-click
• View the oprofiled log
• One-click launch with sane defaults

Future Plans

• Robust filtering for events/sessions/images
• Code-colourization (similar to EclEmma) for code hotspots
• Comparing two sessions/runs similar to functionality of opreport
• Increase test coverage

Screenshots

• 

  OProfile view

• 

  A launch config tab

Try It Out!

• Check out the project into a workspace from eclipse.org svn at svn://dev.eclipse.org/svnroot/technology/org.eclipse.linuxtools
• You will need the 3 plugins under oprofile/trunk, and the 2 plugins under profiling/trunk:

     org.eclipse.linuxtools.oprofile.core
     org.eclipse.linuxtools.oprofile.launch
     org.eclipse.linuxtools.oprofile.ui
     org.eclipse.linuxtools.profiling.launch
     org.eclipse.linuxtools.profiling.ui

• To install, run (as root) the script in org.eclipse.linuxtools.oprofile.core/scripts (currently only tested on fedora x86 machines). This will build a required binary, install a consolehelper authentication link for the plugin to use and ensure that OProfile is installed and loaded properly:

     $ sudo ./install

• From there, run the plugin as an Eclipse Application.
• Tested using Eclipse 3.4.1, CDT 5.0, OProfile 0.9.3 on Fedora 9 x86.

by Kent Sebastian <ksebasti@redhat.com>