pmcstat(8) today suffers from a number of limitations because of its reliance on gprof(1) for the final presentation step when reporting profiling information:

• gprof cannot analyse calls that cross executable objects (for example, between a main program and a shared library).
• 
  
• gprof isn’t cross platform capable: it cannot analyse non-native binaries.
• 
  

One of the ways to solve these issues is to make either one of pmcstat or gprof smarter. It turns out that an ELF parsing library that allows both these tools to be written in an architecture independent way is useful. In addition to pmcstat and gprof, there are a small number of tools in the base system that implement ad-hoc ELF parsers for their own use. These too would become more robust by using a standard API.
I didn’t find a BSD-licensed ELF parsing library that implemented the libelf(3) API used by Solaris and other SysV-like systems. So I’ve started an implementation. The wiki page http://wikitest.freebsd.org/LibElf tracks this effort.

I’ve updated the PmcTools wiki page to include more information about the project. The wiki site now lists known bugs, the current plan of work and future directions for hwpmc(4) and related tools.

Please do take a look.

A test post, on flz@’s new blog site for FreeBSD developers.