Re: [Valgrind-developers] path profiling

[Rick G. <rcg...@ve...>]

On 4/11/2013 11:31 AM, Niall Douglas wrote:
>> An alternative approach that comes to my mind is to collect the hot
>> paths, save them, and then post-process with the chip specific
>> instruction timings.
>>
>> ....
>>
>> That said, if you have further ideas regarding your approach above, I would
>> love to hear those for future reference. Collecting useful non-intrusive
>> performance data is a problem for all of us anywhere in the software
>> industry.
>>
>> Niall
>>
Sure - An area of personal long-term interest has been using path 
profiling to permit better optimizations/more context 
information/application behavior information.
As part of delving into such, I have put together a whole program path 
profiler which is: temporally-preserving, lossless, and capable of 
capturing long (single-threaded) application traces.  It is currently 
based upon PIN (www.pintool.org) : x86_64 Linux, 64-bit only at 
present.  One item on my personal 'todo' list is to determine whether or 
not such could be hooked up to valgrind instead of PIN; if so, I would 
love to contribute it to valgrind for general use.

It is available at: http://gorton-machine.org/rick/PathProfiling - which 
generally describes my collection approach.  The C++ version is a 
from-scratch rewrite done in Nov./Dec. 2012.  Would that (or some 
variant) help fit your needs?

Regards,

     Richard