op2kcg

The OProfile set of tools, and in particular operf, provide one way of accessing the hardware performance counters under Linux for the purposes of profiling.

The GUI KCachegrind provides a perl script by Josef Weidendorfer called op2calltree which converts the output from operf to that readable by kcachegrind. It can be used as:

$ operf ./a.out
$ opreport -gdf | op2calltree
$ kcachegrind oprof.out.unnamed &

It produces profiling information, by line and by instruction, but, despite its name, it cannot process calltree information.

The similarly-named op2calltree.py by Nathaniel Smith is written in python 2 and converts from the output of opreport -gcf to KCachegrind's callgraph format. It includes the callgraph, but no profiling information.

The script offered here calls opreport itself, twice, and tries to combine the profiling data and the callgraph data.

$ operf -gl ./a.out
$ op2kcg -o out.dat
$ kcachegrind out.dat &

It comes with no guarantees of correctness, fitness for purpose, or anything else. It is written in python 3. And it can be downloaded as op2kcg.

There is also an example of its usage, a more complicated example with gprof, an example with valgrind/callgrind, and some notes on the call graph.

Known issues

It does not work well with threaded code, even with OMP_NUM_THREADS=1.

Recursive functions may show incorrect counts in kcachegrind: see this bug report.