Various tools for low level profing of code running on the Dart VM. # Uprobe based profiling [uprobes](https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/trace/uprobetracer.html) is a user-space dynamic tracing mechanism. Using this mechanism the kernel can be instructed to place a tracepoint at a particular file offset within a specific binary. Whenever this tracepoint is hit the kernel will fetch values from the execution context based on the uprobe's description and emit an event. A developer can subscribe to uprobe events in a few different ways including [perf_event_open](https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/perf_event_open.2.html) syscall. uprobes have been enabled by default on all newish Linux kernels (4.14+), however they are only truly usable on Android/ARM64 starting from 5.10+. `bin/set_uprobe.dart` is a helper script for placing uprobes inside binaries and using this for profiling. The core workflow looks like this: ```console $ sudo $(which dart) runtime/tools/profiling/bin/set_uprobe.dart probeName symbol binary ``` This will create an uprobe with name `probeName` which triggers whenever the given `symbol` inside the given `binary` is called. You can then record an event (and collect the call stack) using: ```console $ sudo perf record -g -e uprobes:probeName ... ``` ## Allocation profiling with uprobes AOT compiler can emit a special probe point (`stub AllocationProbePoint`) which triggers for each new space allocation from generated code. `set_uprobe` script has special support for this probe point: it will configure probe point to record additional information (address of allocated object, allocation top and cid of the allocated object) allowing to post process collected data into an actual allocation profile. Start by compiling your application with `--generate-probe-points`: ```console $ pkg/vm/tool/precompiler2 --generate-probe-points test.dart test.aot ``` Then install uprobe on `AllocationProbePoint`: ```console $ sudo $(which dart) runtime/tools/profiling/bin/set_uprobe.dart alloc AllocationProbePoint test.aot ``` Record the profile: ``` $ sudo perf record -g -e uprobes:alloc out/ReleaseX64/dartaotruntime test.aot $ sudo chmod 0755 perf.data ``` Produce a coalesced allocation profile from the recording: ``` $ dart runtime/tools/profiling/bin/convert_allocation_profile.dart perf.data $ pprof -flame pprof.profile ```