freebsd-dev/usr.sbin/pmcannotate/pmcannotate.8

.\" Copyright (c) 2008 Nokia Corporation
.\" All rights reserved.
.\"
.\" This software was developed by Attilio Rao for the IPSO project under
.\" contract to Nokia Corporation.
.\"
.\" Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
.\" modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions
.\" are met:
.\" 1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright
.\"    notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
.\" 2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright
.\"    notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the
.\"    documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
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.\" This software is provided by the authors ``as is'' and
.\" any express or implied warranties, including, but not limited to, the
.\" implied warranties of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose
.\" are disclaimed.  in no event shall the authors be liable
.\" for any direct, indirect, incidental, special, exemplary, or consequential
.\" damages (including, but not limited to, procurement of substitute goods
.\" or services; loss of use, data, or profits; or business interruption)
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.\" $FreeBSD$
.\"
.Dd November 20, 2008
.Dt PMCANNOTATE 8
.Os
.Sh NAME
.Nm pmcannotate
.Nd "sources printout with inlined profiling"
.Sh SYNOPSIS
.Nm
.Op Fl a
.Op Fl h
.Op Fl k Ar pathname
.Op Fl l Ar level
.Ar pmcout.out binaryobj
.Sh DESCRIPTION
The
.Nm
utility can produce both C sources or assembly sources of a program with
a line-by-line based profiling.
The profiling information is retrieved through a
.Xr pmcstat 8
raw output while the program operations are retrieved through the
.Xr objdump 1
tool.
.Pp
When calling
.Nm
the raw output is passed through the
.Ar pmcout.out
argument, while the program is passed through the
.Ar binaryobj
argument.
.Pp
As long as
.Nm
relies on
.Xr objdump 1
and
.Xr pmcstat 8
to work, it will fail if one of them is not available.
.Sh OPTIONS
The following options are available:
.Bl -tag -width indent
.It Fl a
Shows the program profiling inlined in the assembly code only.
No C information involving C sources is provided.
.It Fl h
Prints out information about the usage of the tool.
.It Fl l Ar level
Changes the lower bound (expressed in percentage) for traced functions
that will be printed out in the report.
The default value is 0.5%.
.It Fl k Ar kerneldir
Set the pathname of the kernel directory to argument
.Ar kerneldir .
This directory specifies where
.Nm
should look for the kernel and its modules.
The default is
.Pa /boot/kernel .
.El
.Sh LIMITATIONS
As long as
.Nm
relies on the
.Xr objdump 1
utility to retrieve the C code, the program needs to be compiled with
debugging options.
Sometimes, in particular with heavy optimization levels, the
.Xr objdump 1
utility embeds the code of inlining functions directly in the callers,
making an output difficult to read.
The x86 version reports the sampling from pmcstat collecting the following
instruction in regard of the interrupted one.
This means that the samples may be attributed to the line below the one
of interest.
.Sh SEE ALSO
.Xr objdump 1 ,
.Xr pmcstat 8
.Sh AUTHORS
.An Attilio Rao Aq Mt attilio@FreeBSD.org