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oprofile is a performance monitoring tool that runs on linux system. Generally, oprofile has been included in linux system modules, but oprofile module is not supported on ARM, so we have to install it manually.

oprofile supports multi-thread program. It records the number of function calls, and can also output the source code to show results user-friendly. So it fits well to performance monitoring on TX2.

Download

Download the newest version of oprofile

$ wget http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/oprofile/oprofile-1.4.0.tar.gz
$ tar zxvf oprofile-1.4.0.tar.gz
$ cd oprofile-1.4.0

Installation

$ sudo apt-get install libpopt-dev libiberty-dev binutils-dev
$ ./configure
$ make -j4
$ sudo make install

Test

After installation，perform command operf to see if it could get CPU information normally. If it fails and the output is like this:

unable to open /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/online

This is because TX2 only launches 4 CPU cores by default. The other two CPU cores are closed. Use below command to open the other two CPU cores:

$ sudo nvpmodel -m 0

How to use

oprofile provides variety of commands, the commands operf, opreport and opannotate are used more often. Take testing perception as an example.

  • 1.modify script/apollo_bash.sh, add command operf behind keyword nuhup in line 239. As shown below：

operf_command

  • 2.use script like ./script/perception.sh to launch perception program

And now, operf is collecting data of perception program. Stopping perception program in any approach can stop the collecting process.

Output

After stopping perception program, a directory named oprofile_data is generated in current directory. Use command opreport to show the total statistics:

$ opreport

As shown below:

opreport_

Use command opreport to show the statistics of each function:

$ opreport -l bazel-bin/modules/perception/perception

Because there is too much information to show, so it’s better to save the output into a file.

$ opreport -l bazel-bin/modules/perception/perception > perception_op_funcs.md

As shown below:

opreport_file

Use command opannotate to show the statistics with source code:

$ opannotate -s bazel-bin/modules/perception/perception > perception_op_details.md

Notice: It only supports one operf program to be running at any time, so when operf program is running, we could launch another program with operf.

oprofile official website: http://oprofile.sourceforge.net/news/

oprofile user manual: http://oprofile.sourceforge.net/doc/index.html