Zack's Kernel News

Creating libperf

Jiri Olsa recently posted a large patchset to begin the process of migrating the perf profiling code out of the core kernel code and into its own libperf library. perf is a debugging tool that is virtually never encountered by regular users. It profiles parts of the kernel in order to identify bottlenecks and other slowdowns. This lets the developers know which areas of the kernel might offer a big reward for receiving their attention.

Converting perf to a library is certainly a large task, so Jiri's code was just an initial pass at creating a library infrastructure (based largely on the existing libbpf code), onto which more and more could be migrated over time. Initially, the code was limited to basic counting operations, such as tallying up the number of CPUs and threads or enabling and disabling events. In the perf world, an "event" is a trigger point that allows perf to do various actions in the midst of a piece of kernel code that has no idea it's being profiled.

The problem with creating a full libperf library to entirely replace perf in one fell swoop is that it's too prone to errors. Jiri said the amount of code that would need to be rewritten was truly vast, so the likelihood of creating lots and lots of bugs was pretty high. Creating the stable basic infrastructure first, and then migrating the various pieces in a relatively straightforward progression, would avoid that problem and would make the bug-hunting process much cleaner for everyone.

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