Open Source Summit India 2026

Perfetto is a tracing and profiling tool developed by Google and well integrated into Android. It's also used for Chromium and can be used on any Linux device, too.

In this talk, I want to give a practical and hands-on introduction to Perfetto. I will briefly describe the architecture of Perfetto which consists of the trace recording, trace analysis and trace visualization. Then I will describe and explain thfe key features of the Perfetto UI for tracing and profiling Android applications, native services, binder communication and gernally the Linux kernel, e.g., the ftrace events for IRQs or the scheduler. I will also present specialized features in Perfetto that the Android team implemented to analyze the graphics stack. Additionally, I will share real world usage tips and common pitfalls to avoid from my project experience. And at the end, I will showcase the SQL trace processor capability to programmatically analyze traces that can also be integrated into a command line or CI testing workflow.