1.147. oprofile

An updated oprofile package that corrects architecture-specific bugs and adds support for Nehalem-EP and IBM POWER7 processors is now available.

OProfile is a system-wide profiler for Linux systems. The profiling runs transparently in the background and profile data can be collected at any time. OProfile uses the hardware performance counters provided on many processors, and can use the Real Time Clock (RTC) for profiling on processors without counters.

This update applies the following fixes and enhancements:

* An incorrect argument in a binutil library call caused a segmentation fault in opreport whenever the --debug-info option was used. The elf_find_function() function in libbfd required a non-NULL symbol, but opreport did not receive a warning whenever NULL symbols were present. This update adds an early warning system for this, thereby resulting in more graceful error reporting for the presence of NULL symbols rather than a segmentation fault. (BZ#450642)

* OProfile now supports Nehalem-EP processor performance events. (BZ#498619)

* When the OProfile daemon started on the Itanium architecture, it created children processes to run perfmon; however, those children processes did not properly close file descriptors for stdin, stdout, and stderr. This could prevent oprofiled from properly sending output to any third-party applications. This update corrects the behavior by adding close() functions for open stdin, stdout, and stderr file descriptors, which corrects the daemon behavior on the Itanium architecture. (BZ#518480)

* A regression in the binutils-devel static library caused the bfd_get_section_by_name() function to produce incorrect output. This regression was caused by an error that was present in the binutils-devel specfile when it was compiled. Since OProfile uses binutils-devel at compile time, bfd_get_section_by_name() also cause opreport -l to fail. With this release, binutils-devel is compiled with a corrected specfile; OProfile is then re-compiled with this version of binutils-devel, thereby fixing the regression. (BZ#527679)

* OProfile now supports the IBM POWER7 processor. (BZ#566524)

All OProfile users should apply this update.