Threading analysis tools and OS

[karthikadevi]

Is it mandatory that thetools like Thread Checker,Vtunes work only in certain OSs...?We have got some systems installed withFedora core 6and those systems have these tools installed in them...Can't wecheckparallel programs using these toolsin Windows Xp???

[robert-reed]

Quoting - karthikadevi

Is it mandatory that thetools like Thread Checker,Vtunes work only in certain OSs...?We have got some systems installed withFedora core 6and those systems have these tools installed in them...Can't wecheckparallel programs using these toolsin Windows Xp???

There is some dependence on OS for a couple reasons. For example, Intel Thread Checker has a browser component that only runs on Windows.There is a collection module called tcheck_cl that can be used on Linux machines to collect data and it has an output option to generate an HTML file, the best format to view the data locally, but the browser offers additional services for organizing and filtering the reports, only available on Windows.

One more specific OS constraint has to do with the instrumentation process. Intel Thread Checker and certain collectors in VTune Analyzer do binary instrumentation and thus need to be able to recognize certain features in the code (for Intel Thread Checker, that includes things like thread and process synchronization calls) using signatures that may be dependent on a particular runtime library and thus sensitive to OS and version. There is a library available to declare such interfaces for non-standard/third party parallel code support libraries or home built synchronizers.

Some bugs you encounter may be universal enough to show up on Linux or on Windows implementations of the same code, but not all are guaranteed to be so. Using the OS and tools you have maybe a useful expedient in some cases but not all.