sysprof 3.20.0

[Christian Hergert <christian hergert me>]

Hi everyone!

I just pushed tarballs for Sysprof 3.20.0. I decided to follow the GNOME
release versioning in hopes that it will inspire us to make regular
releases every 6 months or so.

Additionally, I've moved the tarballs to GNOME infrastructure to
simplify making releases in the case that I fall of the face of the planet.

We should probably update http://sysprof.com/ as well, although I
suspect Søren will be needed for that. Perhaps we can use the GNOME
application wiki (wiki.gnome.org/Apps) and just forward the domain name
there, but I'll let others decide if that's the right thing to do.

I hope you all enjoy it (and that I didn't break any of your workflows).

I'm waiting on a new bugzilla sysprof product to be created. Until then,
feel free to send me bug reports or complain, and I'll do my best to
ensure things work for your use case (within reason).

A couple things I'd like to think about for the future:

 * Visualizing additional data (cpu, mem, net, frame-clocks)
 * Remote profiling (embedded ARM/Atom, VM, server, etc)


News
====

Sysprof 3.20.0 is a major rewrite of the sysprof internals.

 * The GTK+ user interface has been ported to GTK+ 3, and includes
   the use of modern GTK+ patterns, including GtkHeaderBar.

 * A new library, libsysprof-2 has been created, which contains the
   internals for implementing a Linux perf-based profiler.

 * A new library, libsysprof-ui-2 has been created, which can be used by
   IDEs to provide profiling capabilities. GNOME Builder is expected to
   take advantage of this.

 * Sysprof uses a new binary capture format, to allow for collecting
   more types of data than simply Perf callchain information.

 * Data collection sources have been abstracted, allowing for new types
   of data collection to occur. Additionally, it is now possible to port
   Sysprof to other operating systems if contributors are found to
   implement those features. As before, Sysprof is currently supported
   on Linux, where the perf_event_open syscall is available.

 * The sysprof capture format supports information from JITd languages.
   Patches to Gjs (GNOME's wrapper around mozjs24) exist that can export
   JIT information from the JavaScript engine.

 * Sysprof now supports launching an application as part of the
   profiling process.

 * Sysprof can attach to one-or-more existing processes to collect
   profiling information. This still uses the Linux perf infrastructure,
   which means sampling is still performed.

 * The user interface provides a stopwatch for the amount of time that
   has elapsed since recording started. If you find that the sysprof UI
   shows up in your capture, we suggest using sysprof-cli to collect
   samples.

 * The Sysprof UI provides tags next to common GNOME libraries used in
   the GNOME stack to allow users to quickly identify libraries that
   may not have fully-qualified symbol names.

 * The binutils based demanger has been removed in favor of
   abi::__cxx_demangle() function. This fixes modern C++ demangling
   and vastly simplifies the Sysprof codebase. However, it does require
   a C++ compiler and linker to build Sysprof. Applications using
   libsysprof-2 and libsysprof-ui-2 do not require a C++ compiler.

 * Sysprof now provides a D-Bus service, sysprofd, which can perform
   elevated perf_event_open syscalls on behalf of the user interface
   after appropriate authorization. Polkit is used to perform the
   authorization. This service requires sd-bus from systemd 222 and
   newer. If you choose not to use this service, or do not have
   systemd on your system, you will have to perform system-wide
   captures as root, either via the UI, or via sysprof-cli.

 * sysprof-cli now supports executing a command with the -c option.

 * A new mimetype for *.syscap is installed to allow opening capture
   files from Nautilus or other file-managers.

 * The sysprof artwork has been updated.

 * Sysprof can now be translated using GNOME's i18n and l10n
   infrastructure.

 * Sysprof now comes with a modest help manual which can be viewed with
   the Yelp documentation browser.

 * New code in sysprof has been licensed under the GPLv3 or newer.

Translations

 * Brazilian Portuguese by Rafael Fontenelle
 * German by Mario Blättermann
 * Polish by Piotr Drąg
 * Serbian by Мирослав Николић

It is worth noting that Sysprof is still a sampling based profiler.
However, it should now be possible to extend sysprof to support tracing
via callgrind. If you are interested in helping on this effort, please
let us know and we can help you get started.

Happy Perf Hunting,

-- Christian Hergert <christian hergert me>


ChangeLog
=========
https://download.gnome.org/sources/sysprof/3.20/sysprof-3.20.0.changes
(203K)

Download
========
https://download.gnome.org/sources/sysprof/3.20/sysprof-3.20.0.tar.xz (494K)
  sha256sum:
4a338ad41bfffae87ef281f6e75c9660b3e0c6671bf5233be0c3f55a5e5b1ce5