Perfetto v57: Release Announcement

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Lalit Maganti

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Jul 6, 2026, 12:57:34 PM (13 days ago) Jul 6
to Perfetto Development - www.perfetto.dev

We’re excited to share Perfetto v57.1! This release introduces an installable AI skill that teaches coding agents how to use Perfetto, a long-awaited fix for overlapping events in JSON traces (commonly affecting the PyTorch profiler), state tracks, a brand-new track type alongside slices and counters, end-to-end support for systemd journald logs, a rework of the query results grid, and new SDK capabilities like nested tracks and correlation ids.

Note: v57.0 was never released due to an issue with the install of the newly introduced AI skill. v57.1 includes a fix for this issue.

🤖 An AI skill for Perfetto

Perfetto now ships an AI skill that teaches coding agents how to record, query, and analyze traces, including guided workflows for common investigations. It works with any Agent Skills-compatible agent (Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, Gemini CLI, OpenCode, and others) and bundles a working trace_processor for the agent to use:

# Claude Code
/plugin marketplace add google/perfetto@ai-agents

# Codex
codex plugin marketplace add google/perfetto --ref ai-agents

# Other agents
curl -fsSL https://get.perfetto.dev/agents-install | python3 - --agent <opencode|antigravity|pi>

See the Using AI with Perfetto docs for agent-specific install paths and what the skill can do.

🧩 Overlapping events in JSON traces now work

Perfetto now imports overlapping "ph": "X" (complete) events in JSON (Chrome Trace Event Format) traces instead of silently dropping them. This was a long-standing pain point (#4280) for tools which emit overlapping synchronous events, notably traces from the PyTorch profiler: the affected slices vanished from both the timeline and SQL, and some users were resorting to self-hosting old versions of the UI. Overlapping events are now ingested onto overflow tracks which the UI merges back into a single thread track, so everything is visible in the timeline and queryable in SQL.

overlapping JSON events rendering in the timeline

Note that overlapping "X" events remain outside the Trace Event Format spec: the importer records stats naming the offending events (surfaced in the UI’s import warnings) so you can flag them to your tracing tool’s maintainers. If you maintain such a tool, prefer async ("b"/"e") events, which is how the format natively represents genuinely overlapping intervals.

🚦 State tracks

Slices and counters have a new sibling: state tracks, a first-class way to record the state of a system or subsystem over time (e.g. “Buffering”, “Playing”, “Paused”). A state track always has exactly one current value; each event simply transitions it to a new state, and clearing it marks the track as idle.

state_tracks

You can emit states from all the SDKs:

// C++ SDK
perfetto::StateTrack track("Player state");
TRACE_STATE("player", "Buffering", track);

// C SDK (high-level API)
PERFETTO_TE(player, PERFETTO_TE_STATE("Buffering"),
            PERFETTO_TE_REGISTERED_TRACK(&player_state_track));

The Android Java SDK gets the same capability. Trace Processor ingests state events into a new state SQL table, and the UI renders state tracks natively with a dedicated details panel.

📜 systemd journald logs

Linux system logs can now be captured as part of a trace, end to end:

  • A new linux.systemd_journald data source records journald entries while tracing, with filters for minimum syslog priority, SYSLOG_IDENTIFIERs, and systemd unit names.
  • Trace Processor stores them alongside Android logcat entries in a unified log table, distinguished by a new log_source column (plus a linux_systemd_journald_logs view in the standard library).
  • The UI gained a JournaldLog plugin: a logs track on the timeline plus a filterable logs tab (priority, tags, free text).
journald

Big thanks to @staticfloat for contributing this feature!

🖥️ UI

The query results grid got a big upgrade: columns can be sorted, reordered, and hidden, the sidebar is collapsible, and SQL errors are now surfaced properly in the grid.

query_grid
  • Shift + mouse-wheel scrolls the timeline horizontally.
  • The Heap Dump Explorer now opens by default on more traces, keeps its state in shared permalinks, and shows oom_score_adj in the overview.
  • Saved custom textproto record configs can be re-opened and edited.
  • Adjacent slices that share a boundary timestamp now render with a 1px gap, so back-to-back instances of the same slice are visually distinguishable.
  • A new smaps plugin shows an instants track with a datagrid details panel for traces containing /proc/<pid>/smaps data.
  • A new opt-in Arm Telemetry Solution plugin adds an Arm CPU page (under Support) for loading Arm CPU telemetry specs, which turn raw PMU counters into derived per-CPU metrics (e.g. IPC, cache misses) shown as tracks.

🧰 SDK

  • Nested tracks with sibling ordering and merging in the C SDK high-level ABI and the Android Java SDK (PerfettoTrack): build multi-level track hierarchies and control how sibling tracks are sorted and merged in the UI.
  • Correlation ids: tag events that belong to the same logical operation without implying a causal link (use flows for those), via PERFETTO_TE_CORRELATION_ID() / PERFETTO_TE_CORRELATION_ID_STR() in the C SDK and PerfettoTrackEventBuilder.setCorrelationId() in the Java SDK.
  • The TRACE_STATE / PERFETTO_TE_STATE() APIs for state tracks described above.

🔬 Profiling

heapprofd’s process_cmdline now supports partial wildcard matching (e.g. system_* or /system/bin/*), with the same semantics as the perf profiling and Java heap dump data sources. Wildcards only match already-running processes, so configs using them must set no_startup = true.

🧠 Trace Processor

  • trace_processor can now load traces directly from URLs and ui.perfetto.dev permalinks:
trace_processor query "https://ui.perfetto.dev/#!/?s=<hash>" "select count(*) from slice"
  • Track descriptors support explicit thread and process ordering, so producers can control how their processes and threads are sorted in the UI.
  • The Adreno GPU adreno_cmdbatch_retired and adreno_cmdbatch_sync ftrace events are now parsed into GPU timeline slices.
  • The perfetto Python package now defaults to a trace_processor binary pinned to the package version instead of downloading the latest build at runtime, making analysis scripts reproducible. Opt back into the old behavior with TraceProcessorConfig.fetch_latest_trace_processor.

⚙️ Tracing service & probes

  • The RelayPort IPC service (multi-machine tracing) is now only exposed on producer sockets that explicitly opt in; the new --enable-relay-endpoint-on=<sock> flag enables it per-socket, while --enable-relay-endpoint keeps its existing semantics.
  • New ftrace events: psci_domain_idle_enter / psci_domain_idle_exit for finer-grained CPU power-state insight than cpu_idle alone, plus disp_dpu_line_underrun and panel settings events.
  • The Windows ETW data source now supports system_io_provider_events.

🛠️ v57.1 patch fixes

  • AI: Fixed the AI skill missing its bundled trace_processor wrapper. The wrapper now ships inside the skill directory itself, for every install method and agent.

A huge thanks to everyone, both inside and outside of Google, who contributed to making Perfetto v57 a success. ♥️

Happy Tracing!

New Contributors

For complete details, see the changelog or view all changes on GitHub.

Download Perfetto v57.1 from our releases page, get started at docs.perfetto.dev, or try the UI directly at ui.perfetto.dev.

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