[RFC] Adding Support for Firefox's Gecko Profile Format

From: Anup Sharma
Date: Wed May 24 2023 - 15:25:13 EST


Hello everyone,

I'm happy to share that I'll be working on adding support for Firefox's Gecko profile format.
This format is utilized by the Firefox profiler, which is a powerful tool for performance analysis
and debugging. By enhancing the perf data command to generate perf.data files in the Gecko
profile format, it will allow us to leverage the capabilities of the Firefox profiler for visualizing
and analyzing the performance data.

As a starter task, I have created a test for testing the perf data JSON converter command.
I'm also looking for a few more starter tasks related to this project. I would greatly appreciate
your advice and guidance.

In my effort to identify any existing bugs, I have enabled flags like 'fsanitize=address' to detect
potential issues but have not found any :). Additionally, I am running perf data commands to ensure
that all use cases are handled properly.

I have one question regarding the installation process. Typically, I navigate to the perf directory,
run 'make', and then cp 'perf' to '/usr/bin'. However, I noticed that by default, perf is installed in
the '~/bin/perf' directory. Could someone please clarify why this is the case? Furthermore, I would
like to know how all of you compile the perf tree.

Thank you for your support and I'm looking forward to collaborating with you on this project!

Regards,
Anup