New type of packages? "foo-profile"

[Ryan Lewis]

Hi,

My name is Ryan. I'm a PhD student in Computer Science, and fedora
ambassador/packager.
I am really busy academically, so my exposure to the project is
limited. In my work within
computational topology, I do quite a bit of high performance
computing. My current project
being the design and implemenation of fast multicore algorithms for a
commonly computed
mathematical gadget. I've learned quite a bit about how to write good,
generic, and extremely
fast code.

I'm proposing that we consider a new type of extra software package:
foo-profile. This
package would be close to a "release" build of software, but, would
have options such as
"-fno-emit-frame-pointer" enabled.

Having stack frame pointers enabled within libraries is extremely
valuable for profiling.
When you have complex scientific codes it can be challenging to
pinpoint from where the symbol
__pthread_cond_wait is being hit the most from. On the other hand
using a debug compilation
means that you can't be sure that you are profiling something at all
similar to what happens when
you enable optimizations.

Thoughts?

-rhl





-rhl