Re: [RFC/PATCHSET 00/14] perf report: Add support to accumulate hist periods (v2)

Pekka Enberg
2013-11-01T09:18:36Z

On Fri, Nov 1, 2013 at 9:55 AM, Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org> wrote:
> Btw., if anyone is interested in improving the GTK front-end, it
> would be _really_ nice if it had a 'start profiling' button like
> sysprof has today, with a 'samples' field showing the current number
> of samples. (We could even improve upon sysprof by adding 'stop'
> functionality as well ;-)
>
> A bit like perf top, except the reporting session is hidden until
> the user actively requests the profile.
>
> Maybe it could even be called a gtk version of 'perf top', with a
> button to start/stop collection, with another button to
> activate/deactivate reporting output, and yet another button to
> reset the profiling buffer.
>
> With that feature set perf would be a ready sysprof workflow
> replacement I think. (I've Cc:-ed Pekka, just in case! :-)

Sure, "start/stop" button is useful for system-wide profiling but you
also want to be able to start an application for profiling from the UI.
I don't remember if SysProf supports that but the Shark profiler on Mac
OS X does.

Btw, to make GTK-front end even more useful, we should:

(1) Have a drop-down for selecting a specific process from system-wide
profile.

(2) Show 'perf annotate' from 'perf report' when a function is
double-clicked.

Pekka