Introduction

The perf_to_profile binary can be used to turn a perf.data file, which is
generated by the linux profiler, perf, into a profile.proto file which can be
visualized using the tool pprof.

For details on pprof, see https://github.com/google/pprof

THIS IS NOT AN OFFICIAL GOOGLE PRODUCT

Prerequisites:

• Protocol buffers: http://github.com/google/protobuf
• Google Test: http://github.com/google/googletest

Compilation:

To install all dependences and build the binary, run the following commands.
These were tested on Debian GNU/Linux 8 (jessie):
sudo apt-get -y install autoconf automake g++ git libelf-dev libssl-dev libtool make pkg-config git clone --recursive https://github.com/google/perf_data_converter.git cd perf_data_converter/src make perf_to_profile

If you already have protocol buffers and googletest installed on your system,
you can compile using your local packages with the following commands:
sudo apt-get -y install autoconf automake g++ git libelf-dev libssl-dev libtool make pkg-config git clone https://github.com/google/perf_data_converter.git cd perf_data_converter/src make perf_to_profile

Place the perf_to_profile binary in a place accessible from your path (eg /usr/local/bin).

Running tests:

There are a small number of tests that verify the basic functionality.
To run these, after successful compilation, run:
make check clean make check clean -C quipper/ -f Makefile.external

Usage:

Profile a command using perf, for example:
perf record /bin/ls

The example command will generate a profile named perf.data, you
should convert this into a profile.proto then visualize it using
pprof:

perf_to_profile perf.data profile.pb
pprof -web profile.pb

Recent versions of pprof will automatically invoke perf_to_profile:
pprof -web perf.data

Contribution:

We appreciate your help!

Note that perf data converter and quipper projects do not use GitHub pull
requests, and that we use the issue tracker for bug reports.