dev-util/oprofile

[James]

Howdy,

Is dev-util/oprofile the same tool that AMD mentions here:
http://developer.amd.com/tools-and-sdks/open-source/open-source-tools/

Does anyone have any experience, comments or suggestions on it's
use to profile various kernel parameters one is tweaking?

Particulary, if one is tweaking a very specialized gentoo machine,
such as a router, firewall, db server, etc etc are these
tools useful as one tweaks the myriad of kernel settings that 
do affect performance?


If so, what semantics (organizational approaches ) does one
employ with oprofile and any other tools. one employs
to best evaluate your kernel tweaks?


All comments and info are much appreciated. As I build out quite
a few machines for test and evaluation, I'm looking for a systematic
approach to evaluating various kernel tweaks for (kernel) performance
testing, tablulation and long term monitoring. Any related tools/ebuilds
that I should learn about would be interesting too. (perfmon2)  for example?


TIA,
James