system-wide profiler for Linux systems

 OProfile is a performance profiling tool for Linux systems, capable
 of profiling all running code at low overhead. It consists of a
 daemon for collecting sample data, plus several post-profiling tools
 for turning data into information.
 .
 OProfile leverages the hardware performance counters of the CPU to
 enable profiling of a wide variety of interesting statistics, which
 can also be used for basic time-spent profiling. All code is profiled:
 hardware and software interrupt handlers, kernel modules, the kernel,
 shared libraries, and applications (the only exception being the
 OProfile interrupt handler itself). Note that different architectures
 can use different hardware mechanisms to collect data.
 .
 OProfile is currently in alpha status; however it has proven stable over
 a large number of differing configurations. As always, there is no warranty.