freebsd man page for pmcannotate

PMCANNOTATE(8)						    BSD System Manager's Manual 					    PMCANNOTATE(8)

NAME
     pmcannotate -- sources printout with inlined profiling

SYNOPSIS
     pmcannotate [-a] [-h] [-k pathname] [-l level] pmcout.out binaryobj

DESCRIPTION
     The pmcannotate utility can produce both C sources or assembly sources of a program with a line-by-line based profiling.  The profiling
     information is retrieved through a pmcstat(8) raw output while the program operations are retrieved through the objdump(1) tool.

     When calling pmcannotate the raw output is passed through the pmcout.out argument, while the program is passed through the binaryobj argu-
     ment.

     As long as pmcannotate relies on objdump(1) and pmcstat(8) to work, it will fail if one of them is not available.

OPTIONS
     The following options are available:

     -a      Shows the program profiling inlined in the assembly code only.  No C information involving C sources is provided.

     -h      Prints out information about the usage of the tool.

     -l level
	     Changes the lower bound (expressed in percentage) for traced functions that will be printed out in the report.  The default value is
	     0.5%.

     -k kerneldir
	     Set the pathname of the kernel directory to argument kerneldir.  This directory specifies where pmcannotate should look for the ker-
	     nel and its modules.  The default is /boot/kernel.

LIMITATIONS
     As long as pmcannotate relies on the objdump(1) utility to retrieve the C code, the program needs to be compiled with debugging options.
     Sometimes, in particular with heavy optimization levels, the objdump(1) utility embeds the code of inlining functions directly in the call-
     ers, making an output difficult to read.  The x86 version reports the sampling from pmcstat collecting the following instruction in regard of
     the interrupted one.  This means that the samples may be attributed to the line below the one of interest.

SEE ALSO
     objdump(1), pmcstat(8)

AUTHORS
     Attilio Rao <attilio@FreeBSD.org>

BSD
								 November 20, 2008							       BSD