Bug 9779

Summary:	remote profiling
Product:	[Build System, Metadata & Runtime] OE-Core	Reporter:	Jussi Kukkonen <jku>
Component:	kernel	Assignee:	Unassigned <unassigned>
Status:	RESOLVED OBSOLETE	QA Contact:
Severity:	enhancement
Priority:	Medium	CC:	randy.macleod, ross.burton, tim.orling, tom.zanussi
Version:	unspecified
Target Milestone:	Future
Hardware:	x86
OS:	Multiple
Whiteboard:
OS type for building Yocto:	---	Type of Regression:	Unknown (Hard to categorize)
Verified:		Documentation change:	Don't know

Description Jussi Kukkonen 2016-06-15 11:16:20 UTC

(This could be a bug or enhancement, depending on how you look at it)

oprofile-ui was already pretty broken and will now be removed as we're moving to Gtk+3 (alternatively the code would require quite a bit of changes, mostly to port the Glade UI to GtkBuilder). So we don't have a remote profiler.

The best solution would be to add remote functionality to sysprof: Implement a  SpProfiler that connects to and controls a sysprof instance running on target. This might be quite involved -- on the other hand chergert is an active maintainer who would probably be very helpful ...

The workaround for now is to build sysprof without gtk PACKAGECONFIG, profile on target using sysprof-cli and copy the results to another machine and run sysprof there.

Comment 1 Ross Burton 2016-06-16 16:39:50 UTC

Tim was talking to me about how Eclipse has perf support and can support remote debugging, so Eclipse may be an alternative that works with minimal effort and aligns with our SDK story.

Tim, do you have anything to add?

Comment 2 Tim Orling 2016-10-27 15:13:28 UTC

Just noticed this again during bug triage call. In my very quick search for documentation, this is what I found:

http://wiki.eclipse.org/Linux_Tools_Project/PERF/User_Guide#Remote_Profiling

I am not a profiling expert, so forgive me if I am missing your point.

Comment 3 Jussi Kukkonen 2016-10-27 15:22:15 UTC

(In reply to comment #2)
> Just noticed this again during bug triage call. In my very quick search for
> documentation, this is what I found:
> 
> http://wiki.eclipse.org/Linux_Tools_Project/PERF/User_Guide#Remote_Profiling
> 
> I am not a profiling expert, so forgive me if I am missing your point.


I'm fine with closing this: I wasn't aware of the eclipse/perf support at the time. sysprof is a nice tool but putting a lot of resources on integrating it when there's a solution already does not sound like a great use of time.

Comment 4 Tim Orling 2016-10-27 16:18:37 UTC

My suggestion is that someone (likely me) runs through the Tracing and Profiling wiki [0] and performs and documents those same steps using the Eclipse Linux Tools [1]. If anything is missing in Eclipse, we can then request an enhancement and help drive the functionality by Gerrit review [2]. I suppose this sounds like a new bug for 2.3.

[0] https://wiki.yoctoproject.org/wiki/Tracing_and_Profiling
[1] http://wiki.eclipse.org/Linux_Tools_Project/User_Guides
[2] https://git.eclipse.org/r/#/q/status:open+project:linuxtools/org.eclipse.linuxtools

Comment 5 Ross Burton 2020-11-05 08:33:14 UTC

Revisited thoughts:

I'm curious if sysprof now supports remote profiling. However, that assumes that the user is running Linux, and these days there are cross platform tools.

Specifically, does VSCode have an extension for 'perf' that works with the remote connections?

Comment 6 Randy MacLeod 2022-11-10 16:08:53 UTC

We have perf and sysprof so unless there's an upstream feature/tool that we should support, we have nothing to add.