oprofile for i586 kernels?

[Jesse Barnes]

On Friday, June 23, 2006 8:24 pm, Dave Jones wrote:
> oprofile needs P6 style MSRs, it doesn't make sense to enable it on
> 586s. The performance monitoring counters were introduced with the
> PPro for Intel & athlon for AMD. The other vendors never implemented
> them (VIA still don't to this day even in their 686 flavoured C3s).

Even for decent profiling support?  I've used it in the past on my VIA 
EPIA based machine with some success, so I don't think it's completely 
useless, even if I'm not getting all the fancy performance counters.  
E.g.:

samples  %        app name                 symbol name
2490     90.1847  vmlinux-2.6.16-rc5       acpi_processor_idle
69        2.4991  vmlinux-2.6.16-rc5       acpi_safe_halt
21        0.7606  bash                     (no symbols)
21        0.7606  vmlinux-2.6.16-rc5       do_wp_page
14        0.5071  oprofiled                (no symbols)
13        0.4708  vmlinux-2.6.16-rc5       get_page_from_freelist
12        0.4346  ext3                     (no symbols)
11        0.3984  libc-2.4.so              
__gconv_transform_utf8_internal
11        0.3984  libc-2.4.so              mbrtowc
6         0.2173  libc-2.4.so              _int_malloc

is much better than the output I'd get from 'readprofile' after booting 
with builtin support, don't you think?

Jesse