A whole layer performance analysis method for Android platforms

As the products based on Android platform have been widely spread in consumer electronics market, the needs for systematic performance analysis have significantly increased. We implemented a whole layer performance analysis tool set combining and integrating available open source performance analysis tools. Android framework layer profiling is performed DDMS mechanism with a little modification and the kernel layer profiling is based on Ftrace. The reason why we selected Ftrace instead of Oprofile as kernel layer profiler is that the Oprofile often misses the important kernel events to analyze since Oprofile is using purely time-based sampling. While Ftrace provides accuracy in performance profiling, the additional costs to perform kernel events profiling are significant. Therefore, minimizing the profiling cost maintaining the accuracy of event logging has been a primary issue in performance profiling at kernel layer.