
Advanced System Profiling, Tracing and Trace Analysis with Perfetto in Android and Yocto
- Anna-Lena Marx
- Embedded , Conferences
- October 8, 2024
Together with my colleague Stefan Lengfeld.
Tracing is a capable mechanism for deep system analysis and profiling with a minimal overhead. By recording defined system events, in Linux but also Android, tracing can be used to analyze concurrency or latency issues, for example. Android’s systrace tool made it easy to analyze and correlate traces and events due to a graphical UI, in order to help developers identify performance bottlenecks. The successor to this advanced and convenient tool is called Perfetto. It’s available for pure Linux too, and part of Yocto (meta-oe) since Langdale now. In the talk, we’ll have a look into
- using Perfetto with Android and Yocto,
- adding trace events to your applications,
- recording traces and
- analyzing system and application traces with the graphical GUI.
This will allow you to take full advantage of the Perfetto trace viewer UI for analyzing memory usage, CPU scheduling, latency and more.
Presented at
- Open Source Summit Europe, Vienna, Austria, 2024
Related Posts

Android Automotive OS: A short introduction into Google's AAOS
- Anna-Lena Marx
- April 2, 2024
- Embedded , Conferences
Android, or the Android Open Source Project (AOSP), is primarily known from the smartphone market. What is less well known, however, is that the AOSP also provides a good basis for embedded systems and ensures a pleasant reading experience on eReaders, for example.
Google is now increasingly pushing into the automotive sector with Android Automotive. But what exactly is Android Automotive or the Android Automotive Operating System (AAOS)? How does it differ from Android or the AOSP? And what are the advantages over classic operating systems for infotainment?
Read Post
Raspberry Pi für die professionelle Produktentwicklung - Eine gute Idee?
- Anna-Lena Marx
- May 10, 2022
- Embedded , Conferences
Maschinen und Geräte durch Vernetzung und Software aufzuwerten ist ein Kerngedanke des IoT. So werden die resultierenden Projekte häufig aus der Fachdomäne mit dem Wunsch nach schnellen und einfachen Erfolgen gestartet. Die Idee liegt dann nahe den beliebten Raspberry Pi als Basis zu nutzen. Das Gerät ist ja bekannt, fast alles wurde schon einmal von irgendwem gemacht und ins Netz gestellt. Klingt fast zu schön, um wahr zu sein - ist es auch aus professioneller Sicht. Die Gründe hierfür und welche Faktoren bei der Entscheidung für eine Hard- und Software-Plattform als Basis für ein IoT Produkt berücksichtigen werden sollten, sind Inhalt des Vortrags.
Read Post
A Gentle Power Off for ZEReader: Replacing the Hard Switch with a Latching Power Circuit
- Anna-Lena Marx
- November 16, 2025
- Zereader , Electronics , Embedded
With the second revision, the way ZEReader is turned on and off got a massive redesign.
The hard on/off switch in the first revision was dead simple and worked great—with one big flaw from a user’s perspective. You could not recognize if the reader was on or off on the first sight. The old switch just closed or opened the loop with the power supply, and due to the E-Paper display just holding the state, you had no chance to tell.
Besides, there was no possibility at all to implement some kind of graceful shutdown mechanism, which would allow me to save all important state information and show a clear device off indicator.
This situation was totally fine for the very first prototype, but it started to get annoying very soon. A new approach was needed!