Perfetto for AOSP platform developers

Perfetto is the tracing and profiling tool developed by Google and well integrated into Android. It has replaced the Catapult trace viewer and the systrace mechanism that was used previously in Android.

In this talk I want to give an introduction to Perfetto for AOSP platform developers. I will shortly describe the architecture of Perfetto which consists of the trace recording, trace analysis and trace visualization. Then I describe and explain the key features of the Perfetto UI for tracing and profiling Android applications, native services, binder communication and the Linux kernel, e.g. the ftrace events for IRQs or the scheduler. I also present specialized features in Perfetto that the Android team implemented to analyze the graphics stack. At the end, I will showcase the SQL trace processor capability to programmatically analyze traces.

Perfetto architecture, Perfetto UI structure and features for data sources and trace analysis, Using Perfetto for system and Android application tracing, trace processing with SQL