HP Caliper for Linux Release Notes Release 5.2 March 2010 HP Part Number: 5900-0601 Published: March, 2010 Edition: 5.
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Table of Contents 1 Highlights of This Release............................................................................................................5 New Options and Enhancements in 5.2...............................................................................5 Deprecations.........................................................................................................................5 2 Known Problems and Workarounds........................................................................
1 Highlights of This Release NOTE: For the latest information about HP Caliper, see the HP Caliper Web site at http://hp.com/go/caliper. In particular, you should go to the Latest Release page and see if there is any information about problems found after the software kit was produced. For more information about these highlights, see the HP Caliper User Guide. If you have questions about HP Caliper, send email to caliper-help@cup.hp.com. New Options and Enhancements in 5.2 The HP Caliper 5.
2 Known Problems and Workarounds GUI Limitations • • • Using the same HP Caliper GUI project for both HP-UX and Linux sometimes results in corruption of the project. When this occurs, the GUI will post an error message at the end of a collection run saying it failed to save the information to the project. This limitation can be avoided by using separate workspaces for HP-UX and Linux.
• • • 8 workaround to this problem is to boot the system with the nohalt kernel option, which prevents the processor from going into the idle state. Generally, this means adding this option to the appropriate configuration lines in the elilo.conf file, which typically resides in /boot/efi/efi/distro-specific-directory/elilo.conf. On some Linux systems (notably SuSE) with only a Firefox browser, selecting Help in the GUI might not do anything. This is due to the which command being aliased to type -p.
3 Installation Information Operating System Requirements HP Caliper has been tested and is supported on SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 and 10, RedHat 4, Debian 3.0-based systems. HP Caliper will only run on a Linux kernel with version 2.6.5 or higher and will not install on a kernel earlier than 2.6.5. HP Caliper has been primarily validated with code produced with gcc and g++, and minimally tested with code produced from the Intel icc compiler.
Java Java version 1.5.0.03 is required if you want to attach HP Caliper to an application and enable attribution of samples to JVM compiled methods at run time. Java 1.5 is needed to run the HP Caliper GUI. Java 1.5 is also needed if you want to measure a Java application on HP-UX with HP Caliper. On Windows systems, download and install JDK 5.0 (latest update) from: http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/download.jsp On Linux X86 and Itanium (64bit) systems, download and install JRockit 5.
HP Caliper can be installed in an alternate location if desired, using this command: $ dpkg --instdir=newpath --install=path_of_DEB_file where newpath is the directory under which you would like the full HP Caliper directory tree to be created.
4 Documentation and Other Information Resources The complete HP Caliper documentation set contains the following: • HP Caliper Quick Start • HP Caliper User Guide • HP Caliper Advisor Rule Writer Guide • HP Caliper Ktrace Features Guide • HP Caliper for HP-UX Release Notes • HP Caliper for Linux Release Notes You can get more information about HP Caliper in these ways: • An HP Caliper man page is provided. Type: man caliper • Help text: To get short help text, type caliper -h or caliper -?.
• • Using HP Caliper with an application program to characterize the Itanium memory hierarchy Using HP Caliper to measure performance data related to translation lookaside buffers (TLBs) You can also read these technical reports about the microarchitecture used in HP Integrity servers: • Dual-Core Update to the Intel® Itanium® 2 Processor Reference Manual for Software Development and Optimization, Document Number 308065-001.
5 Support Information For Answers to Your Questions You can get help with using and understanding HP Caliper by sending email to the HP Caliper development team. Please send questions to caliper-help@cup.hp.com. For Support Questions on the Web For support questions, contact the HP support organization at their Web site, the IT Resource Center (ITRC). Contact the site nearest you, either Americas/Asia-Pacific or Europe. The ITRC gives you access to: • A technical knowledge base with self-solve tools.
To sign up: Send email to: majordomo@cxx.cup.hp.com.
6 Changes in Previous Releases This section describes changes for the two releases prior to this one. Changes for Version 5.1 New Options and Enhancements The HP Caliper 5.1 release has the following improvements: • The cstack report has been enhanced to report inter-process blocking primitives (semaphores, message queues, sockets, pipes, regular file descriptors, and so on.).
NOTE: : When collecting data, be sure to use the command line's –db-save option or the GUI Collect view's Measurement Storage options (see Measurement tab) if you wish to save symbols, code, and line tables for off-line viewing. • • • • • The dcache measurement now shows dcache misses caused by RSE activity.
• • The --overflow-block option has been added to specify whether the target application should be blocked when the PMU sampling buffer is full. The default is "TRUE" (i.e., the target application will be blocked until HP Caliper has completed processing all the samples in the buffer). This option is valid only for PMU based per-process measurements on Linux. There are several new options for programming the PMU for advanced measurements. Refer to the manpage descriptions of --omr, --dbrp, and --ibrp.
