PerfKit: A Nicer Way To Look At Valgrind, FTrace, Etc

Christian Hergert has announced the PerfKit tool (or as he calls it, a "toy") during the Linux Plumbers Conference taking place this week in Cambridge. PerfKit provides a GTK user-interface and the ability to provide plug-ins that hook into the various developer utilities like Valgrind (memory profiling/debugging), FTrace (trace system calls), Perf, and other areas. Thereby with PerfKit you don't need to worry about the individual utilities and it's all presented from a nice user-interface. It's like a Phoronix Test Suite for developer tools.

Hergert previously worked for MySpace as a Linux software engineer working on Mono performance tuning who now works for VMware but also works on GNOME development. He is interested in continuing the development of PerfKit for GNOME 3.4 or whatever the future GNOME 3.x release ends up focusing upon improving the developer's experience on the desktop. Additionally, he says, "I have some larger plans with this for more than just profiling, but I'll write about that at a later time when its more formulated in my mind."

Below is a video recorded by Christian that shows off the PerfKit interface when running on Ubuntu's GNOME desktop.

The just-released PerfKit code can be cloned from GitHub.