Note that plotmpl.py tries to share many arguments with plot.py,
allowing plot.py to act as a sort of draft mode for previewing plots
before creating an svg.
Based loosely on Linux's perf tool, perfbd.py uses trace output with
backtraces to aggregate and show the block device usage of all functions
in a program, propagating block devices operation cost up the backtrace
for each operation.
This combined with --trace-period and --trace-freq for
sampling/filtering trace events allow the bench-runner to very
efficiently record the general cost of block device operations with very
little overhead.
Adopted this as the default side-effect of make bench, replacing
cycle-based performance measurements which are less important for
littlefs.
This provides 2 things:
1. perf integration with the bench/test runners - This is a bit tricky
with perf as it doesn't have its own way to combine perf measurements
across multiple processes. perf.py works around this by writing
everything to a zip file, using flock to synchronize. As a plus, free
compression!
2. Parsing and presentation of perf results in a format consistent with
the other CSV-based tools. This actually ran into a surprising number of
issues:
- We need to process raw events to get the information we want, this
ends up being a lot of data (~16MiB at 100Hz uncompressed), so we
paralellize the parsing of each decompressed perf file.
- perf reports raw addresses post-ASLR. It does provide sym+off which
is very useful, but to find the source of static functions we need to
reverse the ASLR by finding the delta the produces the best
symbol<->addr matches.
- This isn't related to perf, but decoding dwarf line-numbers is
really complicated. You basically need to write a tiny VM.
This also turns on perf measurement by default for the bench-runner, but at a
low frequency (100 Hz). This can be decreased or removed in the future
if it causes any slowdown.
The main change is requiring field names for -b/-f/-s/-S, this
is a bit more powerful, and supports hidden extra fields, but
can require a bit more typing in some cases.
- Changed multi-field flags to action=append instead of comma-separated.
- Dropped short-names for geometries/powerlosses
- Renamed -Pexponential -> -Plog
- Allowed omitting the 0 for -W0/-H0/-n0 and made -j0 consistent
- Better handling of --xlim/--ylim
Instead of trying to align to block-boundaries tracebd.py now just
aliases to whatever dimensions are provided.
Also reworked how scripts handle default sizing. Now using reasonable
defaults with 0 being a placeholder for automatic sizing. The addition
of -z/--cat makes it possible to pipe directly to stdout.
Also added support for dots/braille output which can capture more
detail, though care needs to be taken to not rely on accurate coloring.
Now both scripts also fallback to guessing what fields to use based on
what fields can be converted to integers. This is more falible, and
doesn't work for tests/benchmarks, but in those cases explicit fields
can be used (which is what would be needed without guessing anyways).
