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From: Ingo Molnar on 2 Mar 2010 05:40

* Ingo Molnar <mingo(a)elte.hu> wrote:

> Here's our experience with tools/perf/. Hosting the project in the kernel
> proper helped its quality immensely:
>
> - It's much easier to synchronize new features on the kernel side and on the
> user-space side. The two go hand in hand - they are often implemented in
> the same patch.

Just look at an example from today, a perf+KVM feature patch posted by Yanmin
Zhang:

http://www.mail-archive.com/kvm(a)vger.kernel.org/msg29770.html

That single patch implements the following "perf kvm" commands:

perf kvm top
perf kvm record
perf kvm report
perf kvm diff

Both the kernel-space and the user-space changes are in that single patch.

Anyone who'd like to try it out can apply it and get an updated kernel plus
updated tooling and can start profiling KVM guests straight away. You just
check out the kernel, apply the patch and that's it - you can go. It doesnt
get any more convenient than that to do development.

Such kind of a unified repository is a powerful concept, and we make use of
those aspects of tools/perf/ every day. You could only pry it out of our cold,
dead fingers ;-)

Btw., this is one of the things that FreeBSD does right - and i believe it is
one of the technical concepts behind Apple's success as well. Apple, with a
tenth's of Linux's effective R&D budget can consistently out-develop Linux. I
think that's in part due to there not being a strict chinese wall between the
Apple kernel, libraries and applications - it's one coherent project where
everyone is well-connected to each piece, with no artificial project-cultural
boundaries and barriers. People can and do move between those areas of the
larger "Apple" project to achieve their goals - regardless of how many
components need touching for a given area of interest.

IMHO we should learn from that - while we are good in many areas there's
always aspects of Linux that can be improved. But i digress.

Thanks,

Ingo
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From: Avi Kivity on 7 Mar 2010 04:40
On 03/02/2010 12:30 PM, Ingo Molnar wrote:
> * Ingo Molnar<mingo(a)elte.hu> wrote:
>
>
>> Here's our experience with tools/perf/. Hosting the project in the kernel
>> proper helped its quality immensely:
>>
>> - It's much easier to synchronize new features on the kernel side and on the
>> user-space side. The two go hand in hand - they are often implemented in
>> the same patch.
>>
> Just look at an example from today, a perf+KVM feature patch posted by Yanmin
> Zhang:
>
> http://www.mail-archive.com/kvm(a)vger.kernel.org/msg29770.html
>
> That single patch implements the following "perf kvm" commands:
>
> perf kvm top
> perf kvm record
> perf kvm report
> perf kvm diff
>
> Both the kernel-space and the user-space changes are in that single patch.
>
> Anyone who'd like to try it out can apply it and get an updated kernel plus
> updated tooling and can start profiling KVM guests straight away. You just
> check out the kernel, apply the patch and that's it - you can go. It doesnt
> get any more convenient than that to do development.
>
> Such kind of a unified repository is a powerful concept, and we make use of
> those aspects of tools/perf/ every day. You could only pry it out of our cold,
> dead fingers ;-)
>

perf really is wonderful, but to be really competitive, and usable to
more developers, it needs to be in a graphical environment. I want
'perf report' output to start out collapsed and drill down by clicking
on a tree widget. Clicking on a function name opens its definition.
'perf annotate' should display annotations on my editor window, not in a
pager. I should be able to check events on a list, not using 'perf list'.

Is something like that suitable for tools/perf/? I think you'll find
the intersection of kernel developers and GUI developers to be fairly small.

> Btw., this is one of the things that FreeBSD does right - and i believe it is
> one of the technical concepts behind Apple's success as well. Apple, with a
> tenth's of Linux's effective R&D budget can consistently out-develop Linux. I
> think that's in part due to there not being a strict chinese wall between the
> Apple kernel, libraries and applications - it's one coherent project where
> everyone is well-connected to each piece, with no artificial project-cultural
> boundaries and barriers. People can and do move between those areas of the
> larger "Apple" project to achieve their goals - regardless of how many
> components need touching for a given area of interest.
>
> IMHO we should learn from that - while we are good in many areas there's
> always aspects of Linux that can be improved. But i digress.
>

Folding everything into the kernel tree is one way to approach it; IMO
it is completely unreasonable. The kernel is a very small part of a
complete system.

--
error compiling committee.c: too many arguments to function

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From: Pekka Enberg on 7 Mar 2010 05:00
Hi Avi,

(slightly off-topic)

On Sun, Mar 7, 2010 at 11:35 AM, Avi Kivity <avi(a)redhat.com> wrote:
> perf really is wonderful, but to be really competitive, and usable to more
> developers, it needs to be in a graphical environment. �I want 'perf report'
> output to start out collapsed and drill down by clicking on a tree widget.
> �Clicking on a function name opens its definition. �'perf annotate' should
> display annotations on my editor window, not in a pager. �I should be able
> to check events on a list, not using 'perf list'.

People keep bringing this up but I don't quite agree. Mac OS X has
"shark" which is pretty much what you describe above. However, having
used both, I prefer perf's simple UI for two reasons: it's much easier
to automate perf commands and text-based reports are superior for
sharing results (and keeping track of results when doing performance
optimizations).

That said, AFAICT, it should be pretty simple to implement a
shark-like UI with GTK as current perf code is pretty good fit for
that. I've pondered about doing that myself but quite frankly, I don't
see any big gains in that.

Pekka
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From: Avi Kivity on 7 Mar 2010 05:20
On 03/07/2010 11:56 AM, Pekka Enberg wrote:
> Hi Avi,
>
> (slightly off-topic)
>
> On Sun, Mar 7, 2010 at 11:35 AM, Avi Kivity<avi(a)redhat.com> wrote:
>
>> perf really is wonderful, but to be really competitive, and usable to more
>> developers, it needs to be in a graphical environment. I want 'perf report'
>> output to start out collapsed and drill down by clicking on a tree widget.
>> Clicking on a function name opens its definition. 'perf annotate' should
>> display annotations on my editor window, not in a pager. I should be able
>> to check events on a list, not using 'perf list'.
>>
> People keep bringing this up but I don't quite agree. Mac OS X has
> "shark" which is pretty much what you describe above. However, having
> used both, I prefer perf's simple UI for two reasons: it's much easier
> to automate perf commands and text-based reports are superior for
> sharing results (and keeping track of results when doing performance
> optimizations).
>

Yes, you (and me as well). But most people are quite unlike new and
me. There's a reason GUIs dominate today, and there are even a few
kernel developers that don't use mutt for reading email.

Even for command-line-happy people, GUIs still have an advantage in that
it is much easier to discover features by exploring the UI vs. reading
manual pages.

> That said, AFAICT, it should be pretty simple to implement a
> shark-like UI with GTK as current perf code is pretty good fit for
> that. I've pondered about doing that myself but quite frankly, I don't
> see any big gains in that.
>

Because you are only interested in your own itches (which is perfectly
legitimate, but will keep perf's userbase down).

--
error compiling committee.c: too many arguments to function

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From: Luca Barbieri on 7 Mar 2010 10:20
> perf really is wonderful, but to be really competitive, and usable to more
> developers, it needs to be in a graphical environment. �I want 'perf report'
> output to start out collapsed and drill down by clicking on a tree widget.
> �Clicking on a function name opens its definition. �'perf annotate' should
> display annotations on my editor window, not in a pager. �I should be able
> to check events on a list, not using 'perf list'.
>
> Is something like that suitable for tools/perf/? �I think you'll find the
> intersection of kernel developers and GUI developers to be fairly small.

The latest versions of Gnome Sysprof use perf and provide a GTK+ tree
interface for the profiling output.

However, they are not configurable at all and don't support anything
but call graph profiling, unless they added more features very
recently.
It would be nice to extend sysprof into a more capable tool, and one
that can read perf output files and do so when launched from the
command line.
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