Table of Contents
This manual applies to OProfile version 1.3.0. OProfile is a set of performance monitoring tools for Linux 2.6 and higher systems, available on a number of architectures. OProfile provides the following features:
OProfile is capable of monitoring native hardware events occurring in all parts of a running system, from the kernel (including modules and interrupt handlers) to shared libraries to binaries. OProfile can collect event information for the whole system in the background with very little overhead. These features make it ideal for monitoring entire systems to determine bottle necks in real-world systems.
Many CPUs provide "performance counters", hardware registers that can count "events"; for example, cache misses, or CPU cycles. OProfile can collect profiles of code based on the number of these occurring events: repeatedly, every time a certain (configurable) number of events has occurred, the PC value is recorded. This information is aggregated into profiles for each binary image. Alternatively, OProfile's event counting tool can collect simple raw event counts.