Stripping perf out from kernel source

You may have heard about perf, a tool made by Linux kernel developers to help debugging, benchmarking and profiling.

The problem is you have to download the whole kernel source in order to compile perf. If you are not used to follow kernel developping, most likely you will not have its source. But it’s still possible to compile perf.

As I’m helping to maintain perf package in Archlinux, I made the following script to strip perf from a given kernel version:

#!/bin/bash
 
function usage() {
	cat - <<EOF
USAGE:
	make-perf-util.sh git-tag-version
 
EOF
}
 
function die() {
	echo -e "ERROR\n\tSee usage\n"
	usage
	exit 1
}
 
VERSION=$1
BASENAME=perf-util
NAME=$BASENAME-$VERSION
PKGNAME=$NAME.tar.bz2
 
if [ $# -ne 1 ]; then
	die
fi
 
git checkout $VERSION || die
[ -a $NAME ] && rm -rf $NAME
 
cd tools/perf && make clean
cd -
 
rsync -Ra tools lib include/linux arch/x86/include/asm include/asm-generic \
          --link-dest=. $NAME
tar -cjf $PKGNAME $NAME
rm -rf $NAME
 
echo "created $PKGNAME"

This script works fine with latest 2.6.33 kernel. Regularly I’m uploading to this site the stripped version of perf. The latest one, you find here.