Re: [PerfSuite-users] psprocess weirdness...

[Rick K. <rk...@nc...>]

Tirath,

Thanks for the good synopsis of what's going on and your experiments and 
results - this is a good start to work with.

Backing up a bit, just by way of explanation, psprocess' job is 
conceptually pretty simple: it has to:

1. Parse an XML document and extract the samples within (it uses Tcl/tDOM)
2. Map each sample to a source code location (using libbfd or addr2line)
3. Do some management/bookkeeping/summarization and display results

I'm thinking that one of steps 2 or 3 are where things are going astray 
here.  The unusual thing is that, according to your latest experiments, 
the issues arise when the shell's file management is in the picture, 
either through redirection or a pipe.  That seems strange to me, but is 
something I can try out on this end.

To rule out (or implicate) step 2, I'll work with you off-list to verify 
the PC->source mappings that are generated.  To do this, I'll modify the 
portion of psprocess where this is going on to provide debugging output 
for the individual PC values and where they are mapped.  This will take a 
few days (it'll be based on the 0.6.1 version of PerfSuite which your 
psinv output shows you are using).  I'll supply you a patch which 
should simply be a drop-in file replacement (since psprocess is a 
script, not a compiled object/binary). There is currently no such 
tracing supported in psprocess but I think it will be a useful thing to 
incorporate in general to track things like this.

If the mappings are all identical (as they should be, but that's what 
we're checking for), then it'll point to data management within psprocess
as the problem and we can go from there. 

In any case, we'll summarize the results back to this mailing list and 
with luck will have pinpointed it for the upcoming 0.6.2a3 release.

Rick

p.s. the BFD n/a output only means that the version of BFD on your system 
does not support a way of determining its version number.  See:

http://sources.redhat.com/ml/binutils/2004-02/msg00196.html