Re: KVM usability

Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo
2010-03-07T18:54:21Z

Em Sun, Mar 07, 2010 at 08:15:40PM +0200, Avi Kivity escreveu:
> On 03/07/2010 08:01 PM, Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo wrote:
> >Em Sun, Mar 07, 2010 at 11:35:31AM +0200, Avi Kivity escreveu:
> >>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'.
> >Do you really think that more kernel developers would use perf more
> >frequently if it had some GUI?
>
> Not much. Is perf's target kernel developers exclusively? Who are
> we writing this kernel for?

No, we aren't writing this tool only for kernel developers exclusively,
but that wasn't my question, it was badly formulated, sorry, I shouldn't
have included "kernel" in it :-\

> No wonder everything is benchmarked using kbuild.
>
> >I plan to work on a ncurses tool combining aspects of the existing perf
> >tools, integrating them more, like you suggest above, but even having
> >worked on a pygtk tool that is close to the kernel [1], I'm unsure if
> >doing it using gtk or QT would be something that would entice more
> >developers to use it.
>
> Even for kernel developers there are advantages in a GUI, namely
> that features are easily discovered, the amount of information is
> easily controlled, and in that you can interact (not redo everything
> from scratch every time you want to change something). The
> difference between a curses based tool and a true GUI are minimal
> for this audience.

Ok, I agree with you about easier discoverability of features, path
shortened from report to annotate to starting the editor right at the
line where some event of interest happened, will try to keep the
routines not much coupled with ncurses, but definetely ncurses will be
the first step.

- Arnaldo