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SubjectRe: [PATCH v2 5/5] perf report: Initial TUI using newt
Em Fri, Mar 12, 2010 at 10:45:33AM +0100, Ingo Molnar escreveu:
>
> * Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@infradead.org> wrote:
>
> > From: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
> >
> > Newt has widespread availability and provides a rather simple API as can be
> > seen by the size of this patch.
> >
> > The work needed to support it will benefit other frontends too.
> >
> > In this initial patch it just checks if the output is a tty, if not it falls
> > back to the previous behaviour, also if newt-devel/libnewt-dev is not
> > installed the previous behaviour is maintaned.
> >
> > Pressing enter on a symbol will annotate it, ESC in the annotation window will
> > return to the report symbol list.
>
> Very nice!
>
> a few observations. Firstly, could we perhaps make most of the interface
> functions GUI/TUI invariant? I.e. things like:
>
> > + if (use_browser)
> > + r = vfprintf(fp, fmt, args);
> > + else
> > + r = color_vfprintf(fp, color, fmt, args);
>
> should be abstracted away into a single method:
>
> r = color_vprintf(fp, color, fmt, args);
>
> where color_vprintf() knows about which current GUI front-end to use.

Yeah, I'll get to that, its just that I wanted to have something out as
small as possible and that pointed to the places that need refactoring
to properly support multiple UI frontends.

> (The old color_printf() should be renamed to ascii_color_printf() or so, and
> put into a front-end driver structure perhaps - instead of explicit flags.)

Right

> There's a similar situation here too:
>
> > - ret = vfprintf(stderr, fmt, args);
> > + if (use_browser)
> > + ret = browser__show_help(fmt, args);
> > + else
> > + ret = vfprintf(stderr, fmt, args);
>
> Plus a few other observations about the newt TUI itself:
>
> - The most important first-impression thing in a TUI is to make it obvious to
> exit it. I eventually found that Escape would exit - but it would be nice
> to map 'Q' and 'Ctrl-C' to it as well. Nothing is more annoying than a TUI
> you cannot exit from.

Newt's default is F12, I had to killall perf while developing and
getting to know newtFormAddHotKey to exit, will add the other usual keys to
exit.

> - There's still a 'perf annotate' bug that has been introduced recently, and
> it shows up in the TUI too. The bug is due to us passing this to objdump
> and grep:
>
> 18573 execve("/bin/sh", ["sh", "-c", "objdump --start-address=0xffffffff81387b36
> --stop-address=0xffffffff81387b4f -dS [kernel.kallsyms]|grep -v [kernel.kallsyms]"]
>
> Look at how [kernel.kallsyms] goes unquoted to the shell, so globbing will
> match it on random file names in the current directory - which will then be
> showed by objdump, much to the surprise of the user!

Will fix that, if we don't find a vmlinux file, the kernel symbols will
be marked non annotable in some way.

> - I suspect we should finally make use of the .perfconfig parser and enable people
> to use a different front-end from Newt? Just in case they prefer ASCII.
>
> - When i hit enter on a symbol to annotate it, but the annotation fails, the TUI
> just does nothing currently. Instead it should print something informative
> (and eye-catching) into a status line at the top or the bottom of the
> screen, possibly printed in red characters or so. Not a separate window as that
> needs extra key-hits to get rid of - just a sufficiently visible status
> line would be perfect. There can be a few reasons why some functions can be
> annotated while others cannot be.

Right.

> - [ call-graph data is not represented yet :-) ]

It will

> Anyway, very nice stuff!

Thanks!

- Arnaldo


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