[ANNOUNCE] oprofile profiler

[John Levon]

oprofile is a low-overhead statistical profiler capable of
instruction-grain profiling of the kernel (including interrupt handlers),
modules, and user-space libraries and binaries.

It uses the Intel P6 performance counters as a source of interrupts to
trigger the accounting handler in a manner similar to that of Digital's
DCPI. All running processes, and the kernel, are profiled by default. The
profiles can be extracted at any time with a simple utility. The system 
consists of a kernel module and a simple background daemon.

Typical overhead is around 3 or 4 percent. Worst case overhead on a
Pentium II 350 UP system is around 10-15%

You can read a little more about oprofile, and download a very alpha
version at :

http://oprofile.sourceforge.net/

oprofile is released under the GNU GPL. 

thanks
john