profil -- control process profiling
Standard C Library (libc, -lc)
#include <unistd.h>
int
profil(char *samples, size_t size, vm_offset_t offset, int scale);
The profil() system call enables or disables program counter profiling of
the current process. If profiling is enabled, then at every profiling
clock tick, the kernel updates an appropriate count in the samples
buffer. The frequency of the profiling clock is recorded in the header
in the profiling output file.
The buffer samples contains size bytes and is divided into a series of
16-bit bins. Each bin counts the number of times the program counter was
in a particular address range in the process when a profiling clock tick
occurred while profiling was enabled. For a given program counter
address, the number of the corresponding bin is given by the relation:
[(pc - offset) / 2] * scale / 65536
The offset argument is the lowest address at which the kernel takes program
counter samples. The scale argument ranges from 1 to 65536 and can
be used to change the span of the bins. A scale of 65536 maps each bin
to 2 bytes of address range; a scale of 32768 gives 4 bytes, 16384 gives
8 bytes and so on. Intermediate values provide approximate intermediate
ranges. A scale value of 0 disables profiling.
The profil() function returns the value 0 if successful; otherwise the
value -1 is returned and the global variable errno is set to indicate the
error.
/usr/lib/gcrt0.o profiling C run-time startup file
gmon.out conventional name for profiling output file
The following error may be reported:
[EFAULT] The buffer samples contains an invalid address.
gprof(1)
The profil() function appeared in Version 7 AT&T UNIX.
This routine should be named profile().
The samples argument should really be a vector of type unsigned short.
The format of the gmon.out file is undocumented.
FreeBSD 5.2.1 June 4, 1993 FreeBSD 5.2.1 [ Back ] | 