You can now profile a program from start to finish by doing:
$ profile -c "cat /etc/passwd"
The old "enable or disable profiling for a PID" mode is accessible via:
$ profile -p <PID> -e # Enable profiling for PID
$ profile -p <PID> -d # Disable profiling for PID
The generated profile is available via /proc/profile like before.
This is far from perfect, but it at least makes profiling a lot nicer
to use since you don't have to hurry and attach to something when you
want to profile the whole thing anyway.
As suggested by Joshua, this commit adds the 2-clause BSD license as a
comment block to the top of every source file.
For the first pass, I've just added myself for simplicity. I encourage
everyone to add themselves as copyright holders of any file they've
added or modified in some significant way. If I've added myself in
error somewhere, feel free to replace it with the appropriate copyright
holder instead.
Going forward, all new source files should include a license header.
The kernel now supports basic profiling of all the threads in a process
by calling profiling_enable(pid_t). You finish the profiling by calling
profiling_disable(pid_t).
This all works by recording thread stacks when the timer interrupt
fires and the current thread is in a process being profiled.
Note that symbolication is deferred until profiling_disable() to avoid
adding more noise than necessary to the profile.
A simple "/bin/profile" command is included here that can be used to
start/stop profiling like so:
$ profile 10 on
... wait ...
$ profile 10 off
After a profile has been recorded, it can be fetched in /proc/profile
There are various limits (or "bugs") on this mechanism at the moment:
- Only one process can be profiled at a time.
- We allocate 8MB for the samples, if you use more space, things will
not work, and probably break a bit.
- Things will probably fall apart if the profiled process dies during
profiling, or while extracing /proc/profile
