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NAME

SYNOPSIS

DESCRIPTION

The function enables or disables program counter profiling of the current process. If profiling is enabled, then at every clock tick, the kernel updates an appropriate count in the buffer. The buffer contains bytes and is divided into a series of 16-bit bins. Each bin counts the number of times the program counter was in a particular address range in the process when a clock tick occurred while profiling was enabled. For a given program counter address, the number of the corresponding bin is given by the relation: [(pc - offset) / 2] * scale / 65536 The parameter is the lowest address at which the kernel takes program counter samples. The parameter ranges from 1 to 65536 and can be used to change the span of the bins. A scale of 65536 maps each bin to 2 bytes of address range; a scale of 32768 gives 4 bytes, 16384 gives 8 bytes and so on. Intermediate values provide approximate intermediate ranges. A value of 0 disables profiling.

RETURN VALUES

If the value is nonzero and the buffer contains an illegal address, returns -1, profiling is terminated and is set appropriately. Otherwise returns 0.

FILES

profiling C run-time startup file conventional name for profiling output file

ERRORS

The following error may be reported: The buffer contains an invalid address.

SEE ALSO

BUGS

This routine should be named The argument should really be a vector of type The format of the gmon.out file is undocumented.


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