Exploring Yocto's tracing and profiling tools

Tracing and profiling tools are used to increase the performance, efficiency, and quality of both, applications and systems. User space tracing and profiling tools make use of performance counters and static and dynamic tracing functionality that the Linux kernel offers, as we have seen in the previous recipes.

Getting ready

Tracing enables us to log an application's activity so that its behavior can be analyzed, optimized, and corrected.

Yocto offers several tracing tools including:

• trace-cmd: This is a command line interface to the ftrace kernel subsystem, and kernelshark, a graphical interface to trace-cmd.

• perf: This is a tool that originated in the Linux kernel as a command line interface to its performance counter events subsystem. It has since then expanded and added several other tracing mechanisms.

• blktrace: This is a tool that provides information about the block layer input/output.

• Linux Trace Toolkit Next Generation (LTTng): This is a tool...