Building KDAB hotspot ‘perf’ visualization tool on Fedora

As any respectable software performance person knows, perf is your best (only?) friend. For example, perf report -g has shined a light into the deepest, darkest corners of debugging territory.  Since you asked, it can happily run in a container, too (albeit requiring elevated privileges, but we’re debugging here…).

Typically console formatted output is fine for grokking perf reports, but having recently become addicted to go’s pprof visualization (dot format), handy flame graphs, and on the morbid occassion, VTune, I started looking around for a way to more clearly understand a particular perf recording.

Googling turned up an interesting QT-based tool called hotspot by a company called KDAB.  Screenshots indicate it might be worth kicking the tires.

After some bouncing around figuring out Fedora equivalent package names, I was able to quickly build and run hotspot.  I ran a quick perf record to see if it was going to work at all:

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