[PATCH 0/2 RFC] Add time stamp collection to operf and opreport

Will, Ramya, OProfile community:

As mentioned earlier this week, I have been working on a patch to add
the ability to collect the time stamp for each sample collected by
operf.  I started work on this with Maynard Johnson.  The first patch in
the series adds the command line option -T to operf and opreport to
handle the collection and processing of time stamps.  The list of time
stamps for each sample is put into the XML file by opreport if the -T
option is specified and the time stamps were collected by operf.

Given the number of samples it is very hard to read the data and make
sense of it.  So, the second patch is provided to process and graph the
time stamps.  The patch consists of a shell and perl script.  The perl
script reads up the data from the XML file, process it and generates a
command and data file for gnu plot.  The shell script takes the name of
the XML input file, passes it to the perl script to generate the gnu
plot files.  The shell script then calls gnuplot to generate the graph
as a post script file.  Finally, the shell script will call xdg-open to
display the graph.  These scripts are installed as executables along
with the operf and opreport binaries to make it easy for the user to
process the data. A couple of different formats for displaying the data
is provided as a place to start.  If there are other formats that would
be of use, they can be added in the future.

I am posting the patches for community review and comment. Please let me
know what feed back you have on the patches.  Hopefully, we can add this
functionality to OProfile.  Thank you for your time.

                      Carl Love


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