Oprofile in Vmware Fusion

Question

I am trying to use oprofile as profiling tool inside a virtual machine. However, if I do

operf

I get the following error:

Your kernel's Performance Events Subsystem does not support your processor type.  
Please use the opcontrol command instead of operf.

I thus tried opcontrol. I did the following as root

opcontrol --deinit
rm /root/.oprofile/daemonrc
opcontrol --init
opcontrol --start

which returned the following error

Cannot find event CPU_CLK_UNHALTED
Using default event: CPU_CLK_UNHALTED:100000:0:1:1
Cannot find event CPU_CLK_UNHALTED

According to the bug tracker ( http://sourceforge.net/p/oprofile/bugs/268/ ) what I did is already the workaround to get oprofile working in a VMware environment.

My OS is

Linux version 3.19.0-25-generic (buildd@lgw01-20) (gcc version 4.8.2 (Ubuntu    4.8.2-19ubuntu1) ) #26~14.04.1-Ubuntu SMP Fri Jul 24 21:16:20 UTC 2015

Its installed in a virtual machine. The virtual machine software is VMware 7.1.1. The host OS is Mac OS X 10.10

Answer 1

I was having the same problem and found the solution at http://blogs.epfl.ch/category/3239 via oprofile on Linux running in a virtual machine

It seems by default when the oprofile kernel module is loaded by invoking

opcontrol --init

the timer support is not enabled.

The solution is to unload the kernel module

opcontrol --deinit

and load it manually, passing an option that enables timer support

modprobe oprofile timer=1

After doing that

opcontrol --start-daemon

worked for me.