The write-only control file ctl provides the facilities to profile a module. Messages written to this file initiate and control the profiling.

module name

Add the module or the module whose path is name to the list of modules to be profiled.

start

Start profiling all modules in the above list or, if the list is empty, start profiling all modules loaded by the kernel. The profiling is done by sampling.

startcp

As above but do coverage profiling. All instructions executed in the wanted modules are counted.

startmp

As above but do memory profiling. All heap memory allocations are associated with a line of limbo source and all deallocations with the line that did the allocation.

stop

Stop all profiling.

end

Stop all profiling and free all memory associated with the modules being profiled. The profiler returns to it's initial state with no modules under profile.

interval i

Change the sampling interval to i ms. The default sampling rate is 100 ms.

The second level directories contain information about each module under profile.

The read-only file name contains the name of the module in the form it appears in it's module source file.

The read-only file path contains the path of the dis file that implements the module.

The write-only control file pctl allows finer control of the profiling of a module. It is not used at present.

The read-only file histogram contains statistics about the profiled module. The file contains a list of pairs of integers seperated by a space. The first number of the pair is a program counter value representing the address of a dis instruction. Addresses start from 0 and the list is in order of increasing address. The second number is the frequency with which this address was sampled. Each read of this file returns the next pair in the list. The frequency is guaranteed to be non-zero.

When coverage profiling the second number of each pair is the number of times that dis instruction was executed, when memory profiling it's the amount of memory in bytes.

The coverage profiling can only be done on dis instructions.

The device can do only one of time, coverage or memory profiling at once.