Re: [hatari-devel] Profiler question

Hi Doug,

What format are you using to import symbols?

There are two - one can load the symbols direct from the PRG/TOS if the file was built with GST/DRI (?) format. This did workwell for me from Devpac, I'm not sure I tried it with VASM, since I really only used VASM to generate GCC ".a" format linkables to use with a C project...

I used the gst2ascii tool to export symbols but now I realized it was useless because the symbols are read from the prg itself :) Having said that, it's even more strange then because it was a raw Devpac compile (to be sure I tried both vasm and Devpac).

I don't think that means your code has 100% miss rate. It just means the profiler was able to account for all of the misses which did occur, based on cross-referenced sums.. I'm sure you can ignore it (ask Eero for details).

Aha, ok.

It's better to experiment first with the raw profiled disassembly listing to get a feel for whats happening.

Yes, that's why I have started with the simplest use case :))

It's certainly possible the symbols are not properly 'rebased' relative to your text section. This will cause them all to have wrong addresses (See my notes above)..

There's only one suspicious things, some labels were too long (>22 chars) and reported to be duplicated (i.e. the same label would point to >1 addresses). I could understand if the labels were somehow corrupted but not showing instructions at all? Eero, if you can give me some hints or if I can send you the binary for a test, I'm all ears :)

The fact you are getting DC.W disassembly for the hottest addresses is very strange! This would normally only happen if the memory is being reused by more than one bit of code and/or data. The profiler is a static process which monitors activity at fixed addresses - it expects code remains in one place, and is not replaced or moved after it executes.

Who knows, the project is fairly large (Running game), uses both DSP and CPU, ... I just wanted to have a quick look on its inner loops.

MiKRO / Mystic Bytes
http://mikro.atari.org