Perf basics

Performance counters are a set of special registers in hardware (part of performance monitor unit (PMU) in CPU) that count hardware events such as cache misses, branch predict misses, etc. CPU auto keeps track of these counters.

perf stat: count the occurrences of supported events during process execution
perf list: list the supported events
perf record: collect profile data, outputs into a binary file named “perf.data” by default
perf report: reads this profile data file and generates a concise execution profile. By default, samples are sorted by functions with the most samples first
perf trace: strace but measured time spent!

Awk basics

run execute programs written in the awk programming language, which is specialized for textual data manipulation

TBA…

objdump basics

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cmake basics

Cmake = cross platform make, a build generator

concepts

build tools like make, ninja, etc. are called generators (configured with -G option!)