New Release and New Feature!

[David_A_Intel1]

FYI, VTune Amplifier XE 2016 is now available to all registered users for download from the Intel® Software Products Registration Center.

New in this release is the Memory Access analysis type, which replaces and includes the former Bandwidth analysis type.

Use the Memory Access analysis to identify memory-related issues, like NUMA problems and bandwidth-limited accesses, and attribute performance events to memory objects (data structures), which is provided due to instrumentation of memory allocations/de-allocations and getting static/global variables from symbol information.

Also, with this release, we officially support Linux* 4.0 kernels.

[Vitaly_S_Intel]

Along with other new features, usability improvements and bug fixes this release has significantly improved performance of GUI and CLI commands. You'll notice the difference migrating from 2015 version.

We'd like to hear any feedback from the users about the changes. Stability, performance and usability are our focuses, your help gives us new ideas for improvements.

[dkokron]

I updated to fedora-21, then installed the 2016 parallel studio suite.  All went well until the SEP build which failed with the following.

  AS   /opt/Compliers/Intel/2016.0.047/vtune_amplifier_xe_2016.1.0.424694/sepdk/src/sys64.o
/opt/Compliers/Intel/2016.0.047/vtune_amplifier_xe_2016.1.0.424694/sepdk/src/sys64.S: Assembler messages:
/opt/Compliers/Intel/2016.0.047/vtune_amplifier_xe_2016.1.0.424694/sepdk/src/sys64.S:117: Error: no such instruction: `save_all'
/opt/Compliers/Intel/2016.0.047/vtune_amplifier_xe_2016.1.0.424694/sepdk/src/sys64.S:143: Error: no such instruction: `restore_all'
scripts/Makefile.build:294: recipe for target '/opt/Compliers/Intel/2016.0.047/vtune_amplifier_xe_2016.1.0.424694/sepdk/src/sys64.o' failed
make[2]: *** [/opt/Compliers/Intel/2016.0.047/vtune_amplifier_xe_2016.1.0.424694/sepdk/src/sys64.o] Error 1
Makefile:1388: recipe for target '_module_/opt/Compliers/Intel/2016.0.047/vtune_amplifier_xe_2016.1.0.424694/sepdk/src' failed
make[1]: *** [_module_/opt/Compliers/Intel/2016.0.047/vtune_amplifier_xe_2016.1.0.424694/sepdk/src] Error 2
make[1]: Leaving directory '/usr/src/kernels/4.1.6-100.fc21.x86_64'
Makefile:177: recipe for target 'default' failed
make: *** [default] Error 2

Seems sys64.S references a macro called save_all.  That macro is provided by /usr/src/kernels/4.1.6-100.fc21.x86_64/arch/x86/include/asm/calling.h, but is only available in 32-bit mode.

4.1.6-100.fc21.x86_64 #1 SMP Mon Aug 17 22:20:37 UTC 2015 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

[David_A_Intel1]

This build error is a result of the 4.1 Linux kernel.  If you can downgrade your kernel to 4.0, you will not have this problem.

We expect to release an update with support for 4.1 kernels in the near future (but we cannot publish a date, so please don't ask ;).

[Milian_W_]

@dkokron: It is simple enough to fix the driver. Put https://paste.kde.org/p7h6lbooz into a file in sepdk/src (e.g. linux-compat.h) and include that in sepdk/src/sys64.s and sepdk/src/vtsspp/sys64.s. The contents I pasted I grabbed from here: http://lxr.free-electrons.com/source/arch/x86/include/asm/calling.h?v=4.0#L187

Another compile issue you'll encounter are the uses of user_mode_vm in sepdk/src/vtsspp/stack.c, which can be fixed by removing the _vm suffix, which should work reliably at least on 64bit hosts, see http://lxr.free-electrons.com/source/arch/x86/include/asm/ptrace.h?v=4.0#L107

@Intel: feel free to incorporate this and then please release a bug fix release. It works fine on Linux 4.1.

[dkokron]

@ Milian.  While this procedure does allow me to access the hardware counters from Vtune, it feels kludgy.  I look forward to a formal fix from Intel.

Thank you