Re: [RFC][PATCH 0/9] perf trace: support for general-purpose scripting

From: Frédéric Weisbecker
Date: Tue Oct 06 2009 - 05:41:54 EST


2009/10/6 Tom Zanussi <tzanussi@xxxxxxxxx>:
> Hi,
>
> This patchset defines a generic interface for processing the binary
> output of 'perf trace' and making it directly available to
> user-defined scripts written in general-purpose scripting languages
> such as Perl or Python.  It also builds a general-purpose Perl
> scripting trace processor on top of the new interface and provides a
> few example scripts that exercise the basic functionality.
>
> The main motivation behind it is to provide a more efficient and
> powerful alternative to the popular method of parsing the ascii trace
> output in order to extract useful information from it.  To avoid the
> overhead and complexity of all that, this patchset provides a
> direct-to-script-interpreter pathway for doing the same thing, but in
> a more regularized fashion, one that takes advantage of all the event
> meta-info provided by the tracing infrustructure, such as the
> event/field info contained in the 'format files' designed for that
> purpose.


That's really a great thing! I was also hesitating to implement a
python interface to perf in
order to quickly plug post processing tools. But your patchset does
that in a much more
generic way that I imagined: we can support other languages, we have
well defined
callbacks to process the events...

Really nice, I hope we can give it a try in -tip soon.
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