Manual Pages  — PMCANNOTATE

The pmcannotate utility can produce both C sources or assembly sources of a program with a line-by-line based profiling. The profiling information is retrieved through a pmcstat(8) raw output while the program operations are retrieved through the objdump(1) tool.

When calling pmcannotate the raw output is passed through the pmcout.out argument, while the program is passed through the binaryobj argument.

As long as pmcannotate relies on objdump(1) and pmcstat(8) to work, it will fail if one of them is not available.

As long as pmcannotate relies on the objdump(1) utility to retrieve the C code, the program needs to be compiled with debugging options. Sometimes, in particular with heavy optimization levels, the objdump(1) utility embeds the code of inlining functions directly in the callers, making an output difficult to read. The x86 version reports the sampling from pmcstat collecting the following instruction in regard of the interrupted one. This means that the samples may be attributed to the line below the one of interest.

objdump(1), pmcstat(8)