Downloading and building the latest perf tools

The example below is for a Debian-based system, specifically Ubuntu 20.04 in this case, although there is a package list also for Fedora. We will need 4G of disk space.

git is needed:

$ sudo apt-get install git

perf is in the Linux source tree so get that:

$ cd
$ mkdir git
$ cd git
$ git clone git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git

Alternatively the source code of just the perf tool, and not the whole kernel tree, is archived here.

Get the minimum tools to build it:

$ sudo apt-get install build-essential flex bison

It should be possible to build perf at this stage but it will be missing essential features. Add some more development libraries:

$ sudo apt-get install libelf-dev libnewt-dev libdw-dev libaudit-dev libiberty-dev libunwind-dev libcap-dev libzstd-dev libnuma-dev libssl-dev python3-dev python3-setuptools binutils-dev gcc-multilib liblzma-dev

Note, with v5.19 and earlier, python3-distutils was used instead of python3-setuptools, but that was changed in this commit.

Aside: example packages for Fedora instead of Ubuntu:

sudo yum install flex bison gcc make elfutils-libelf-devel elfutils-devel libunwind-devel python-devel libcap-devel slang-devel binutils-devel numactl-devel openssl-devel

To build perf (with script bindings for python3 instead of python2) and put it in ~/bin/perf :

$ cd ~/git/linux
$ PYTHON=python3 make -C tools/perf install

To use ~/bin/perf, ~/bin must be in $PATH. In Ubuntu, that is added automatically when a user logs in if the ~/bin directory exists (refer ~/.bashrc). If it is not in $PATH, log out and in again. We can echo $PATH to check:

$ echo $PATH
/home/user/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games:/usr/local/games:/snap/bin
$ which perf
/home/user/bin/perf