opendarwin man page for profil

PROFIL(2)						      BSD System Calls Manual							 PROFIL(2)

NAME
     profil -- control process profiling

SYNOPSIS
     int
     profil(char *samples, size_t size, u_long offset, u_int scale);

DESCRIPTION
     The profil() function enables or disables program counter profiling of the current process.  If profiling is enabled, then at every clock
     tick, the kernel updates an appropriate count in the samples buffer.

     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 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 parameter is the lowest address at which the kernel takes program counter samples.  The scale parameter 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.

RETURN VALUES
     If the scale value is nonzero and the buffer samples contains an illegal address, profil() returns -1, profiling is terminated and errno is
     set appropriately.  Otherwise profil() returns 0.

FILES
     /usr/lib/gcrt0.o  profiling C run-time startup file
     gmon.out	       conventional name for profiling output file

ERRORS
     The following error may be reported:

     [EFAULT]		The buffer samples contains an invalid address.

SEE ALSO
     gprof(1)

BUGS
     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.

BSD
								   June 4, 1993 							       BSD