Frame Pointers in the Media

BPF Performance Tools author and all around profiling expert Brendan Gregg wrote a blog post that sums up what was in my Fedora Magazine article quite well.

Though he has this to say on the topic of Fedora who made this ground breaking change and Ubuntu who followed along afterwards:

The main users of this change are enterprise Linux. Back-end servers.

Which is true in the sense of absolute numbers. But I must say it’s been extremely valuable on the desktop.

I can’t imagine having contributed to making VTE (a code-base I was unfamiliar with) twice as fast without it. Especially when that work happened over the course of about two weeks. It’s so much easier to do performance work when one monitor has usable profiler flamegraphs and the other code.

The wash/rinse/repeat cycle has gotten really good on Fedora and our performance future is bright.