q-tools v0.2 released

q-tools v0.2 released

[David Mosberger]

I'm happy to announce that q-tools v0.2 has been released.  q-tools is
a collection of Linux performance analysis tools.  In particular, they
include q-syscollect and q-view, which can be thought of as being more
powerful than gprof, without its pain (no recompilation needed;
multi-threaded apps and shared libraries are supported;
kernel-execution can be profiled; any Itanium 2 PMU event can be
profiled, etc.).

As usual, you can get q-tools via the web page at:

	http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/linux/q-tools/

It may take a couple of hours before the web pages migrate across the
firewall but in the meantime you may also get the q-tools-0.2 tar-ball
directly from the ftp site:

	ftp://ftp.hpl.hp.com/pub/linux-ia64/

There are two major enhancements in this release:

 - SuSE Enterprise Linux 9 (SLES9) is now supported out-of-the-box
   (in addition to the existing Debian support)

 - q-syscollect now has the ability to profile the time spent in
   code which has interrupts disabled (see section
   "Blind-spot-free profiling" in the README for details).

In addition, there are many bug-fixes, in particular some nasty bugs
in q-syscollect got fixed which reared their ugly face primarily on
large SMP machines.

For additional details, I attached the relevant section from the NEWS
file.

Enjoy,

	--david

----
* News for v0.2:

** New features

*** q-syscollect: Add support for interruption-level code-sampling (-i option).
*** q-tools now builds and works out-of-the-box for SuSE (SLES 9).

** Bug fixes

*** q-syscollect: Make it robust against small RLIMIT_MEMLOCK values.
*** q-syscollect: Fix bug which could cause killing of "random" processes.
*** q-syscollect: Fix bug which could cause live-lock when the
                  sampling-buffer filled up.
*** q-syscollect: Fix a memory leak.
*** q-syscollect: Fix handling of backslashes in argument vectors.
*** q-view: Ignore non-function symbols to avoid confusion when a function
            contains a local lable.
*** q-view: Fix topological sort of the call-graph for good.
*** q-view: Ensure weird symbols such as "operator|=" get parsed properly.
*** q-view: Display fully-qualified kernel symbols as SYMNAME<kernel> for
            consistency.
*** q-view: Build symbol table more carefully, e.g., suppressing duplicates
            and use unwind-info to detect procedure-boundaries in stripped
            binaries.
*** q-view: Allow for multiple kallsyms-formated symbol-files to enable,
            e.g., firmware symbol-tables.

RE: q-tools v0.2 released

[Chen, Kenneth W]

David Mosberger wrote on Monday, October 11, 2004 8:53 AM
> I'm happy to announce that q-tools v0.2 has been released.  q-tools is
> a collection of Linux performance analysis tools.  In particular, they
> include q-syscollect and q-view, which can be thought of as being more
> powerful than gprof, without its pain (no recompilation needed;
> multi-threaded apps and shared libraries are supported;
> kernel-execution can be profiled; any Itanium 2 PMU event can be
> profiled, etc.).
>

I'm craving for more, is there a q-merge kind of utility out there? i.e.,
merge all the cpu .hist files into one to get an overall system profile.  I
can do that right now by hand (cat cpu*.hist into one file and then generate
corresponding .info file).  I hope someone already had such tool so I don't
have to reinvent the wheel.

- Ken

RE: q-tools v0.2 released

[David Mosberger]

>>>>> On Mon, 6 Dec 2004 18:38:03 -0800, "Chen, Kenneth W" <kenneth.w.chen@intel.com> said:

  Ken> I'm craving for more, is there a q-merge kind of utility out
  Ken> there?

Not yet.  I definitely want that, too, but I'm currently busy trying
to finish libunwind (putting it in the kernel and making it cover more
architectures).

	--david