Re: [RFC] Adding Support for Firefox's Gecko Profile Format

[Namhyung Kim <namhyung@kernel.org>]

Hi Anup,

On Wed, May 24, 2023 at 12:25 PM Anup Sharma <anupnewsmail@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hello everyone,
>
> I'm happy to share that I'll be working on adding support for Firefox's Gecko profile format.
> This format is utilized by the Firefox profiler, which is a powerful tool for performance analysis
> and debugging. By enhancing the perf data command to generate perf.data files in the Gecko
> profile format, it will allow us to leverage the capabilities of the Firefox profiler for visualizing
> and analyzing the performance data.
>
> As a starter task, I have created a test for testing the perf data JSON converter command.
> I'm also looking for a few more starter tasks related to this project. I would greatly appreciate
> your advice and guidance.
>
> In my effort to identify any existing bugs, I have enabled flags like 'fsanitize=address' to detect
> potential issues but have not found any :). Additionally, I am running perf data commands to ensure
> that all use cases are handled properly.

Great, good to know it works well with asan for the basic use cases at least.

>
> I have one question regarding the installation process. Typically, I navigate to the perf directory,
> run 'make', and then cp 'perf' to '/usr/bin'. However, I noticed that by default, perf is installed in
> the '~/bin/perf' directory. Could someone please clarify why this is the case? Furthermore, I would
> like to know how all of you compile the perf tree.

I guess $HOME is the default prefix unless you set it to other, then
make install will put
the binary there.  You can make sure if your PATH contains the ~/bin and use it.

But it's also possible you can run the perf without installing.  I
have a symlink in
my tmp directory to point to the recent build of the binary and use it
always. :)
To build, you can either 'cd tools/perf; make' or 'make -C tools/perf'
in the top
level linux source tree.  I also pass "BUILD_BPF_SKEL=1" to enable BPF.

Thanks,
Namhyung

>
> Thank you for your support and I'm looking forward to collaborating with you on this project!