Bug 1378670

Summary: operf command gets permission denied
Product: [Fedora] Fedora Reporter: M. Edward (Ed) Borasky <znmeb>
Component: oprofileAssignee: William Cohen <wcohen>
Status: CLOSED EOL QA Contact: Fedora Extras Quality Assurance <extras-qa>
Severity: medium Docs Contact:
Priority: unspecified    
Version: 24CC: rainwoodman, wcohen
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Hardware: x86_64   
OS: Linux   
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Last Closed: 2017-08-08 17:35:17 UTC Type: Bug
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Description M. Edward (Ed) Borasky 2016-09-23 03:19:08 UTC
Description of problem: I'm trying to profile Firefox Nightly with oprofile. I am attempting to start Nightly with the command

$ operf -d ~/nightly_operf/ FirefoxNightly/firefox/firefox
Unexpected error running operf: Permission denied


Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
$ dnf list installed | grep oprofile
oprofile.x86_64                     1.1.0-4.fc24                @fedora         
oprofile-devel.x86_64               1.1.0-4.fc24                @fedora         
oprofile-jit.x86_64                 1.1.0-4.fc24                @fedora         


How reproducible:
Consistent - always happens

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Install Firefox Nightly from Mozilla
2. Create ~/nightly_operf
3. Run operf -d ~/nightly_operf/ FirefoxNightly/firefox/firefox

Actual results:
Permission denied

Expected results:
Firetox Nightly started and oprofile collecting data into ~/nightly_operf

Additional info:

Comment 1 William Cohen 2016-09-23 13:20:32 UTC
This is likely due to newer kernels having /proc/sys/kernel/perf_event_paranoid default to 2 rather than 1 as in older kernels.  oprofile doesn't exclude kernel-space measurements, so the set up of the performance monitoring of operf is failing.  To verify that this is the case as root:

echo 1 > /proc/sys/kernel/perf_event_paranoid

Then retry the operf command as a normal user.

Comment 2 M. Edward (Ed) Borasky 2016-09-23 20:49:11 UTC
Yep - it worked ... so there's probably a note needed in the documentation for Fedora 25. There's nothing about this in https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/24/html/System_Administrators_Guide/ch-OProfile.html

Comment 3 Feng Yu 2017-07-20 23:52:56 UTC
I also ran into this today.

Comment 4 Fedora End Of Life 2017-07-25 23:11:52 UTC
This message is a reminder that Fedora 24 is nearing its end of life.
Approximately 2 (two) weeks from now Fedora will stop maintaining
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Comment 5 Fedora End Of Life 2017-08-08 17:35:17 UTC
Fedora 24 changed to end-of-life (EOL) status on 2017-08-08. Fedora 24 is
no longer maintained, which means that it will not receive any further
security or bug fix updates. As a result we are closing this bug.

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