Open Source Summit Europe 2024

Advanced System Profiling Tracing and Trace Analysis with Perfetto in Android and Yocto

Vortrag (EN) von Anna-Lena Marx und Stefan Lengfeld auf dem Open Source Summit Europe 2024

Tracing is a capable mechanism for deep system analysis and profiling with a minimal overhead. By recording defined system events, in Linux but also Android, tracing can be used to analyze concurrency or latency issues, for example. Android’s systrace tool made it easy to analyze and correlate traces and events due to a graphical UI, in order to help developers identify performance bottlenecks. The successor to this advanced and convenient tool is called Perfetto. It’s available for pure Linux too, and part of Yocto (meta-oe) since Langdale now. In the talk, we’ll have a look into – using Perfetto with Android and Yocto, – adding trace events to your applications, – recording traces and – analyzing system and application traces with the graphical GUI. This will allow you to take full advantage of the Perfetto trace viewer UI for analyzing memory usage, CPU scheduling, latency and more.

About the speakers

Anna-Lena Marx has been working as an Embedded Systems Developer at inovex since 2015 and holds a Master’s degree in Embedded Systems. As a hobby, she also studies Electrical Engineering. Professionally, Anna-Lena focuses on the development of Embedded Systems based on Yocto or the AOSP, kernel drivers, IoT, and organizing the Embedded Systems department. She is also involved in Girl’s Day to get young girls interested in technical careers.

Stefan Lengfeld has been an Embedded Linux and Embedded Android developer at inovex since 2017. He is a Linux kernel contributor and has been professionally involved in all topics related to embedded software development since 2015. Even before that, he dove into the depths of Linux and open source. For the last few years, the Linux and Android graphics stack, system profiling and complex build systems have been his main topics of interest.