That means that almost everything you can do with 'perf report'
can be done with 'perf diff', for instance:

$ perf record -f find / > /dev/null
[ perf record: Woken up 1 times to write data ]
[ perf record: Captured and wrote 0.062 MB perf.data (~2699
samples) ] $ perf record -f find / > /dev/null
[ perf record: Woken up 1 times to write data ]
[ perf record: Captured and wrote 0.062 MB perf.data (~2687
samples) ] perf diff | head -8
     9.02%     +1.00%     find  libc-2.10.1.so               [.] _IO_vfprintf_internal
     2.91%     -1.00%     find  [kernel]                     [k] __kmalloc
     2.85%     -1.00%     find  [kernel]                     [k] ext4_htree_store_dirent
     1.99%     -1.00%     find  [kernel]                     [k] _atomic_dec_and_lock
     2.44%                find  [kernel]                     [k] half_md4_transform
$

So if you want to zoom into libc:

$ perf diff --dsos libc-2.10.1.so | head -8
    37.34%                find  [.] _IO_vfprintf_internal
    10.34%                find  [.] __GI_memmove
     8.25%     +2.00%     find  [.] _int_malloc
     5.07%     -1.00%     find  [.] __GI_mempcpy
     7.62%     +2.00%     find  [.] _int_free
$

And if there were multiple commands using libc, it is also
possible to aggregate them all by using --sort symbol:

$ perf diff --dsos libc-2.10.1.so --sort symbol | head -8
    37.34%             [.] _IO_vfprintf_internal
    10.34%             [.] __GI_memmove
     8.25%     +2.00%  [.] _int_malloc
     5.07%     -1.00%  [.] __GI_mempcpy
     7.62%     +2.00%  [.] _int_free
$

The displacement column now is off by default, to use it:

perf diff -m --dsos libc-2.10.1.so --sort symbol | head -8
    37.34%                   [.] _IO_vfprintf_internal
    10.34%                   [.] __GI_memmove
     8.25%     +2.00%        [.] _int_malloc
     5.07%     -1.00%    +2  [.] __GI_mempcpy
     7.62%     +2.00%    -1  [.] _int_free
$

Using -t/--field-separator can be used for scripting:

$ perf diff -t, -m --dsos libc-2.10.1.so --sort symbol | head -8
37.34, , ,[.] _IO_vfprintf_internal
10.34, , ,[.] __GI_memmove
8.25,+2.00%, ,[.] _int_malloc
5.07,-1.00%,  +2,[.] __GI_mempcpy
7.62,+2.00%,  -1,[.] _int_free
6.99,+1.00%,  -1,[.] _IO_new_file_xsputn
1.89,-2.00%,  +4,[.] __readdir64
$
Signed-off-by: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
Cc: Frédéric Weisbecker <fweisbec@gmail.com>
Cc: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
LKML-Reference: <1260978567-550-1-git-send-email-acme@infradead.org>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>