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This simplifies deployment on embedded devices, where polkit is usually unncessary at runtime, but pulls in quite a few otherwise unncessary dependencies. Start to improve the situation by allowing to selectively disable polkit-agent support at compile time, which aids in container usage scenarios, where one wants to invoke 'sysprof-cli' from within the container. Bypassing polkit-agent in the container is then desired, since the host sysprofd will handle asking for permissions to enable the tracing. It allows for a simpler setup of rootless podman containers, avoiding UID mismatches, that lead to rejection of the tracing enablement. - Add a new 'polkit-agent' meson build feature, that allows to force disabling polkit-agent support (-Dpolkit-agent=disabled). - Mark the 'polkit-agent' feature as enabled, by default, to reflect the current status (sysprof-cli did not build without polkit-agent support). - libsysprof/sysprof-instrument.c: Build fix when polkit is not available, remove the unnecessary 'g_autopr(PolkitDetails) details' variable. - Alter the sysprof-cli dependencies to only attempt to link against polkit-agent, if necessary. Modify sysprof-cli.c to wrap all code using polkit-agent in HAVE_POLKIT_AGENT blocks.
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.