Re: KVM usability

From: Avi Kivity
Date: Sun Mar 07 2010 - 13:16:39 EST


On 03/07/2010 08:01 PM, Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo wrote:
Em Sun, Mar 07, 2010 at 11:35:31AM +0200, Avi Kivity escreveu:
perf really is wonderful, but to be really competitive, and usable to
more developers, it needs to be in a graphical environment. I want
'perf report' output to start out collapsed and drill down by clicking
on a tree widget. Clicking on a function name opens its definition.
'perf annotate' should display annotations on my editor window, not in a
pager. I should be able to check events on a list, not using 'perf
list'.
Do you really think that more kernel developers would use perf more
frequently if it had some GUI?

Not much. Is perf's target kernel developers exclusively? Who are we writing this kernel for?

No wonder everything is benchmarked using kbuild.

I plan to work on a ncurses tool combining aspects of the existing perf
tools, integrating them more, like you suggest above, but even having
worked on a pygtk tool that is close to the kernel [1], I'm unsure if
doing it using gtk or QT would be something that would entice more
developers to use it.

Even for kernel developers there are advantages in a GUI, namely that features are easily discovered, the amount of information is easily controlled, and in that you can interact (not redo everything from scratch every time you want to change something). The difference between a curses based tool and a true GUI are minimal for this audience.

--
Do not meddle in the internals of kernels, for they are subtle and quick to panic.

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