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      1 This is an (incomplete) list of some of the stuff we want to look at doing.
      2 
      3 If you're interested in hacking on any of these, please contact the list first
      4 for some pointers and/or read HACKING and doc/CodingStyle.
      5 
      6 1.0 release
      7 -----------
      8 
      9 (this is a minimal selection of stuff I think we need)
     10 
     11  o default to a vmlinux location: need agreement from kernel developers
     12  o default to --separate=library (with anon, =none, makes not much sense)
     13  o prettify image name for .jo files and allow lib-image: to specify it
     14  o gisle's fixes
     15  o opreport tgid:<tgid> doesn't work even if .jo files with that pid
     16  o Fix:
     17 
     18 warning: [vdso] (tgid:9236 range:0x7fff98ffd000-0x7fff98fff000) could not be found.
     19 warning: /no-vmlinux could not be found.
     20 warning: /usr/lib64/libpanel-applet-2.so.0.2.27.#prelink#.sXCUK1 (deleted) could not be found.
     21 
     22  o amd64 32 bit build needs a sys32_lookup_dcookie() translator in the
     23    kernel
     24  o decide on -m tgid semantics for anon regions
     25  o if ev67 is not fixed, back it out
     26  o lapic : module should says "didn't find apic" if needed, FAQ and doc should
     27   speak a bit about lapic kernel option on x86 and recent kernel
     28  o see the big comment in db_insert.c, it's possible to allow unlimited
     29    amount of samples with a very minor change in libdb.
     30  o if oprofile doesn't recognize the processor selected by the kernel
     31    opcontrol could setup the module in timer mode (remove/reload prolly), and
     32    warn the user it must upgrade oprofile to get all the feature from its
     33    hardware.
     34 
     35 Later
     36 -----
     37 
     38  o remove 2.95/2.2 support so we can use boost multi index container in
     39    symbol/sample container
     40  o consider if we can improve anon mapping growing support
     41 
     42 <movement> [moz@lambent pp]$ ./opreport -lf lib-image:/lib/tls/libc-2.3.2.so /bin/bash | grep vfprintf
     43 <movement> 14        0.1301  6         0.0102  /lib/tls/libc-2.3.2.so   vfprintf
     44 <movement> [moz@lambent pp]$ ./opreport -lf lib-image:/lib/tls/libc-2.3.2.so /usr/bin/vim | grep vfprintf
     45 <movement> 176       2.0927  349       1.2552  /lib/tls/libc-2.3.2.so   vfprintf
     46 <movement> [moz@lambent pp]$ ./opreport -lf lib-image:/lib/tls/libc-2.3.2.so { image:/bin/bash } { image:/usr/bin/vim } | grep vfprintf
     47 <movement> 176      10.9657  +++       349       7.8888  +++       vfprintf
     48 <movement> 14       ---      ---       6        ---      ---       vfprintf
     49 <movement> it seems them as two separate symbols
     50 <movement> but can we remove the app_name from rough_less and still be able to walk the two lists?
     51 <movement> even if we could, it would still go wrong when we're profiling multiple apps
     52 
     53  o Java stuff??
     54  o with opreport -c I can get "warning: /no-vmlinux could not be found.".
     55    Should be smarter ?
     56  o opreport -c gives weird output for an image with no symbols:
     57 
     58     samples  %        symbol name
     59   15965    100.000  (no symbols)
     60 253      100.000  (no symbols)
     61   15965    98.4400  (no symbols)
     62   253       1.5600  (no symbols) [self]
     63 
     64  o consider tagging opreport -c entries with a number like gprof
     65  o --details for opreport -c, or diff??
     66  o should [self] entries be ommitted if 0 ??
     67  o stress test opreport -c: compile a Big Application w/o frame pointer and look
     68    how driver and opreport -c react.
     69  o oparchive could fix up {kern} paths with -p (what about diff between
     70    archive and current though?)
     71  o can say more in opcontrol --status
     72  o consider a sort option for diff %
     73  o opannotate is silent about symbols missing debug info
     74  o oprofiled.log now contains various statistics about lost sample etc. from
     75   the driver. Post profile tools must parse that and warn eventually, warning
     76   must include a proposed work around. User need this: if nothing seems wrong
     77   people are unlikely to get a look in oprofiled.log (I ran oprofile on 2.6.1
     78   2 weeks before noticing at 30000 I lost a lot of samples, the profile seemed
     79   ok du to the randomization of lost samples). As developper we need that too,
     80   actually we have no clear idea of the behavior on different arch, NUMA etc.
     81   Not perfect because if the profiler is running the oprofiled.log will show
     82   those warning only after the first  alarm signal, I think we must dump the
     83   statistics information after each opcontrol --dump to avoid that.
     84  o odb_insert() can fail on ftruncate or mremap() in db_manage.c but we don't
     85   try to recover gracefully.
     86  o output column shortname headers for opreport -l
     87  o is relative_to_absolute_path guaranteeing a trailing '/' documented ?
     88  o move oprofiled.log to OP_SAMPLE_DIR/current ?
     89  o pp tools must handle samples count overflow (marked as (unsigned)-1)
     90  o the way we show kernel modules in 2.5 is not very obvious - "/oprofile"
     91  o oparchive will be more usefull with a --root= options to allow profiling
     92   on a small box, nfs mount / to another box and transfer sample file and
     93   binary on a bigger box for analysis. There is also a problem in oparchive
     94   you can use session: to get the right path to samples files but oprofiled.log
     95   and abi files path are hardcoded to /var/lib/oprofile.
     96  o callgraph patch: better way to skip ignored backtrace ?
     97  o lib-image: and image: behavior depend on --separate=, if --separate=library
     98   opreport "lib-image:*libc*" --merge=lib works but not
     99   opreport "image:*libc*" --merge=lib whilst the behavior is reversed if
    100   --separate==none. Must we take care ?
    101  o dependencies between profile_container.h symbol_container.h and
    102   sample_container.h become more and more ugly, I needed to include them
    103   in a specific order in some source (still true??)
    104  o add event aliases for common things like icache misses, we must start to 
    105   think about metrics including simple like event alias mapped to two or more
    106   events and intepreted specially by user space tools like using the ratio
    107   of samples; more tricky will be to select an event used as call count (no
    108   cg on it) and  used to emulate the call count field in gprof. I think this is
    109   a after 1.0 thing but event aliases must be specified in a way allowing such
    110   extension
    111  o do we need an opreport like opreport -c (showing caller/callee at binary
    112   boundary not symbols) ?
    113  o we should notice an opcontrol config change (--separate etc.) and
    114    auto-restart the daemon if necessary (Run)
    115  o we can add lots more unit tests yet
    116  o Itanium event constraints are not implemented
    117  o GUI still has a physical-counter interface, should have a general one
    118    like opcontrol --event
    119  o I think we should have the ability to have *fixed* width headers, e.g. :
    120 
    121 vma      samples  cum. samples  %           cum. %     symbol name             image name              app name
    122 0804c350 64582    64582         35.0757     35.0757    odb_insert              /usr/loc...in/oprofiled /usr/local/oprofile-pp/bin/oprofiled
    123 
    124   Note the ellipsis
    125  o should we make the sighup handler re-read counter config and re-start profiling too ?
    126  o improve --smart-demangle
    127 	o allow user to add it's own pattern in user.pat, document it.
    128 	o hard code ${typename} regular definition to remove all current limitations (difficult, perhaps after 1.0 ?).
    129  o oprof_start dialog size is too small initially
    130  o i18n. We need a good formatter, and also remember format_percent()
    131  o opannotate --source --output-dir=~moz/op/ /usr/bin/oprofiled
    132    will fail because the ~ is not expanded (no space around it) (popt bug I say)
    133  o cpu names instead of numbers in 2.4 module/ ?
    134  o remove 1 and 2 magic numbers for oprof_ready
    135  o adapt Anton's patch for handling non-symbolled libraries ? (nowaday C++
    136   anon namespace symbol are static, 3.4 iirc, so with recent distro we are
    137   more likely to get problems with a "fallback to dynamic symbols" approch)
    138  o use standard C integer type <stdint.h> int32_t int16_t etc.
    139  o event multiplexing for real
    140  o randomizing of reset value
    141  o XML output
    142  o profile the NMI handler code
    143  o opannotate : I added this to the doc about difference between nr samples
    144   credited to a source function and total number of samples for this function:
    145    "The missing samples are not lost, they will be credited to another source
    146     location where the inlined function is defined. The inlined function will
    147     be credited from multiple call site and merged in one place in the
    148    annotated source file so there is no way to see from what call site are
    149    coming the samples for an inlined function."
    150   I think we can work around this: output multiple instances of inlined
    151   function like :
    152   inline foo() { foo: total 1500 30.00 ...
    153   ... annotated source from all call site 
    154   inline foo() { foo (call site bar()): total 500 10.00
    155   .. annotated source from call site bar() etc.
    156   what about template..., can we do/must we do something like that
    157   template <class T> eat_cpu() and do a similar things, merging and annotating
    158   all instantation then annotating for each distinct instantation, this will
    159   break our "keep the source line number in annotated source file identical to
    160   the original source"
    161  o events/mips/34k/events, some events does not make sense, they get identical
    162   event number, um and counter nr so they overlap, currently commented
    163  o can we find a more efficient implementation for sparse_array ?
    164  o libpp/profile.cpp:is_spu_sample_file() can be simplified by using
    165   read_header()
    166  o while fixing #1819350 I needed to make extra_images per profile session
    167    rather than a global var so I think we need to revisit find_image_path(),
    168    extra_found_images, --image-path (-p).
    169    Actually we can't do something ala:
    170    opreport { archive:tmp1 search_path=/lib/modules/2.6.20 } { archive:tmp2 search_path=/.../2.6.20.9 }
    171    because search_path is specified through -p which is not a part of the
    172    profile spec. Fixing #1819350 covered all case except this one but w/o any
    173    user visible change. Another way will be to save the -p option used with
    174    oparchive in a file at the toplevel of the archive, use it with all tools
    175    when an archive: is specified on the command line and deprecate the use of
    176    -p in such case.
    177  o consider to make extra_images a ref counted object, it's copied by value
    178   a few time but can contain a lot of string. There is also some ugly public
    179   member extra_images to fix.
    180  o daemon bss size can be improved, grep for MAX_PATH to see where dynamic
    181    allocation can be used, try $ nm oprofiled --size-sort too.
    182 
    183 Documentation
    184 -------------
    185 
    186  o the docs should mention the default event for each arch somewhere
    187  o more discussion of problematic code needs to go in the "interpreting" section. 
    188  o document gcc 2.95 and linenr info problems especially for inline functions
    189  o finish the internals manual
    190 
    191 JIT support
    192 -----------
    193 
    194  o We need a more dynamic structure to handle entries_address_ascending and
    195    entries_symbols_ascending, actually many scaling problem occur because they
    196    are array, this was perfect to get a first implementation focusing on
    197    handling overlap and all but the need to qsort/copy arrays at each iteration
    198    is a performance killer. Some sort of AVL tree will do the job.
    199  o Related to the previous, it's possible to do all processing in opjitconv.c
    200    in a single left to right walk of the jitentry list.
    201  o see the FIXME at parse_dump.c:parse_code_unload()
    202  o Increment JITHEADER_VERSION in jitdump.h to be sure that the new code only
    203    accepts dump file created by the new code.
    204  o opjitconv.c:replacement_name() should be enough clever to avoid name
    205    collision so we can remove the recursive call to disambiguate_symbol_names(),
    206    need a hash table or some sort of associative array to check quickly if a
    207    name exists, we will need some sort of avl tree so it's probably better
    208    to do not implement a hash table only for this purpose.
    209  o op_write_native_code() must accept one more parameter, the real code size
    210    which can be zero or equal to code_size, this will allow to create elf
    211    file w/o any code contents, only a symbol table and .text sections w/o
    212    contents (yes ELF format allow that). For dynamic binary translation it'll
    213    avoid to dump tons of code for little use, opannotate --assembly will not
    214    work on such elf file but it can be a real win. It'll need to add to
    215    jitrecord0 a real_size field, and some trickery when building the elf file,
    216    taking care about the case we mix zero code size with non zero code size.
    217    Perhaps we can use it too for java, filtering native method etc. Actually
    218    we allow a simplified form of this feature by allowing to disable/enable
    219    code dumping but at the whole dump level not on a symbol basis, quite
    220    possible sufficient. [mpj: We're backing away from the idea of dumping
    221    JIT records without code.  Since BFD asymbol type does not include symbol size,
    222    the op_bfd technique for determining symbol size relies on knowing the true
    223    file size; and if code is not included in the .jo file, we don't have true size.]
    224  o The pipe used for triggering JIT dump conversion should be used for normal
    225    dumping too.
    226  o See FIXME in agents/jvmti/libjvmti_oprofile.c:
    227    If enablement to get line number info would be configurable through command line,
    228    what should be the default on/off?
    229  o See FIXME in opjitconv/debug_line.c
    230  o The way to use the pipe should be made more secure to avoid denial of service
    231    attacks. We have to think about it.
    232  o Callgraph does not work properly for the .jo files the JIT support creates.
    233    See section Chapter 4, sect 2.3.2 "Callgraph and JIT support". Try to figure
    234    out a way to correlate an anonymous sample callgraph entry with
    235    the .jo file that may exist for the anonymous code.
    236  o see mail from Gisle Dankel:
    237    "JIT_SUPPORT: Adding support for file-backed non-ELF JIT code"
    238    -> should be changed (if useful) before next release
    239  o See FIXME in op_header.cpp:
    240    The check for header.mtime of JIT sample files is not correct because currently
    241    this mtime value is set to zero due to missing cookie setting for JIT sample files.
    242    Some additional check/setting to header.mtime should be made for JIT sample files.
    243  o Mono JIT support:
    244 
    245    2007-11-08: with callgraph massi got
    246    <massi> oparchive error: parse_filename() invalid filename: /var/lib/oprofile/samples/current/{root}/var/lib/oprofile/samples/current/{root}/home/massi/mono/amd64/bin/mono/{dep}/{anon:anon}/32432.0x40a26000.0x40a36000/CPU_CLK_UNHALTED.100000.0.all.all.all/{dep}/{root}/var/lib/oprofile/samples/current/{root}/home/massi/mono/amd64/bin/mono/{dep}/{anon:anon}/32432.0x40a26000.0x40a36000/CPU_CLK_UNHALTED.100000.0.all.all.all/{cg}/{root}/usr/oprofile/bin/oprofiled/CPU_CLK_
    247 
    248    Massi added Mono JIT support, code on the stack is never unloaded and there is
    249    no byte code, code is always compiled to native machine code, this mean than
    250    for mono at least we can do callgraph if we can fix this samples filename
    251    problem.
    252 
    253 General checks to make
    254 ----------------------
    255  
    256  o rgrep FIXME
    257  o valgrind (--show-reachable=yes --leak-check=yes)
    258  o audit to track unnecessary include <>
    259  o gcc 3.0/3.x compile
    260  o Qt2/3 check, no Qt check
    261  o verify builds (modversions, kernel versions, athlon etc.). I have the
    262   necessary stuff to check kernel versions/configurations on PIII core (Phil)
    263  o use nm and a little script to track unused function
    264  o test it to hell and back
    265  o compile all C++ programs with STL_port and test them (gcc 3.4 contain a
    266    debug mode too but std::string iterator are not checked)
    267  o There is probably place of post profile tools where looking at errno will give better error messages.
    268 
    269