lackey/docs/lk-manual.xml

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<!DOCTYPE chapter PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.2//EN"
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<chapter id="lk-manual" xreflabel="Lackey">

<title>Lackey: a very simple profiler</title>

<para>Lackey is a simple Valgrind tool that does some basic
program measurement.  It adds quite a lot of simple
instrumentation to the program's code.  It is primarily intended
to be of use as an example tool.</para>

<para>It measures three things:</para>

<orderedlist>

 <listitem>
  <para>The number of calls to
  <computeroutput>_dl_runtime_resolve()</computeroutput>, the
  function in glibc's dynamic linker that resolves function
  lookups into shared objects.</para>
 </listitem>

 <listitem>
  <para>The number of UCode instructions (UCode is Valgrind's
  RISC-like intermediate language), x86 instructions, and basic
  blocks executed by the program, and some ratios between the
  three counts.</para>
 </listitem>

 <listitem>
  <para>The number of conditional branches encountered and the
  proportion of those taken.</para>
 </listitem>

</orderedlist>

</chapter>