11.1. Introduction to gcov-tool

11.1 Introduction to gcov-tool

gcov-tool is an offline tool to process gcc’s gcda profile files.

Current gcov-tool supports the following functionalities:

• merge two sets of profiles with weights.
• read one set of profile and rewrite profile contents. One can scale or normalize the count values.

Examples of the use cases for this tool are:

• Collect the profiles for different set of inputs, and use this tool to merge them. One can specify the weight to factor in the relative importance of each input.
• Rewrite the profile after removing a subset of the gcda files, while maintaining the consistency of the summary and the histogram.
• It can also be used to debug or libgcov code as the tools shares the majority code as the runtime library.

Note that for the merging operation, this profile generated offline may contain sli