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This instrument triggers the live unwinder in sysprofd to capture a pre-configured amount of stack contents and CPU registers. You can use this instead of SysprofSampler in cases where you do not have frame- pointers but want a useful trace. It does have a moderate amount of CPU overhead compared to just relying on frame-pointers so keep that in mind. Generally useful on platforms that do not have frame pointers such as CentOS.
Sysprof is a sampling profiler that uses a kernel module to generate stacktraces which are then interpreted by the userspace program "sysprof".
See the Sysprof homepage for more information.
Merge requests and bug reports should be sent to sysprof's repository on GNOME's GitLab instance. For general discussion and questions, you can create a new topic in GNOME's Discourse.
The former mailing list is archived in https://mail.gnome.org/archives/sysprof-list/.
Debugging symbols
The programs and libraries you want to profile should be compiled
with -fno-omit-frame-pointer and have debugging symbols available,
or you won't get much usable information.
Building Sysprof
You need some packages installed. The package names may vary depending on your distribution, the following command works on Fedora 36:
sudo dnf install gcc gcc-c++ ninja-build gtk4-devel libadwaita-devel
Then do the following:
meson --prefix=/usr build
cd build
ninja
sudo ninja install
WARNING: ninja install will mostly install under the configured install
prefix but installs systemd service configuration directly in the system
default location /usr/lib/systemd so it won't work without root privileges,
even if the install prefix is a user-owned directory.