oprofile on Linux running in a virtual machine

Question

I'm running a Linux Ubuntu 10.4 VM using VirtualBox. I'm trying to use oprofile to profile some application in the virtual machine. I've installed oprofile 0.9.6 but I cannot get it to work. When I try to start I get the following error:

opcontrol --start
/usr/local/bin/opcontrol: line 323: /usr/local/bin/ophelp: cannot execute binary file
/usr/local/bin/opcontrol: line 1483: /usr/local/bin/oprofiled: cannot execute binary file
Couldn't start oprofiled.
Check the log file "/var/lib/oprofile/samples/oprofiled.log" and kernel syslog

As I'm not sure if VirtualBox could provide access to the performance counters (I'm in doubt here so if you have any pointers it would be great) I defaulted oprofile to the timer interrupt like so:

opcontrol --deinit
/usr/local/bin/opcontrol: line 323: /usr/local/bin/ophelp: cannot execute binary file
Unloading oprofile module
root@dev-ubuntu-10:/usr/local/bin# /sbin/modprobe oprofile timer=1
root@dev-ubuntu-10:/usr/local/bin# opcontrol --init

But still not working and I'm getting the same error. Is it even possible to run oprofile in a VM?

Thanks

Answer 1

I've tried something similar in the past, only with VMware Fusion and a different profiler, and run into the same problem. It seems that access to the performance registers and other low level stuff that profilers need is just not feasible in a VM. You'll need a real machine for profiling, I'm afraid.

Answer 2

You could try installing older versions like oprofile-0.9.7

extract it anywhere then follow steps:

install it by >  1 ./configure 2. make 3. make install

Then try using it it works fine you might want to turn on virtual CPU counters in VMWARE and disable nmi_watchdog registers in linux as they might be used by other profilers.

Answer 3

This error:

/usr/local/bin/ophelp: cannot execute binary file

usually means that you are attempting to execute an x86_64 binary on a 32-bit kernel.

What do file usr/local/bin/ophelp and uname -a print?

Answer 4

use of HPC(hardware performance counters) requires hardware supprot, try to install cpuid in vbox, you will see

 Architecture Performance Monitoring Features (0xa/ebx):
  core cycle event not available           = false
  instruction retired event not available  = false
  reference cycles event not available     = false
  last-level cache ref event not available = false
  last-level cache miss event not avail    = false
  branch inst retired event not available  = false
  branch mispred retired event not avail   = false

Architecture Performance Monitoring Features (0xa/edx): number of fixed counters = 0x0 (0) bit width of fixed counters = 0x0 (0)

It seems that just Vmware and KVM can emulate PMU unit, and not the VBOX

Answer 5

A couple of years ago I had some problem running oprofile inside vmware. I wrote my little experience on this post http://blogs.epfl.ch/category/3239