OProfile and gprof are two statistical profilers that predate perf. They are both offer subsets of the functionality of perf, but they are still quite popular. I will mention them only briefly.
OProfile is a kernel profiler that started out in 2002. Originally, it had its own kernel sampling code, but recent versions use the perf_events infrastructure for that purpose. There is more information about it at http://oprofile.sourceforge.net. OProfile consists of a kernel-space component and a user space daemon and analysis commands.
OProfile needs these two kernel options to be enabled:
- CONFIG_PROFILING in General setup | Profiling support
- CONFIG_OPROFILE in General setup | OProfile system profiling
If you are using the Yocto Project, the user space components are installed as part of the tools-profile image feature. If you are using...