In Intel System Studio 2017, we will continue to support Intel VTune Amplifier for System on Mac OS X. You can use VTune to analyze the performance result captured from Windows, Linux, Android, FreeBSD. All test steps below are performed on Mac OS X El Capitan 10.11.5. First, you will need to know where to download the package. Visit http://intel.ly/system-studio, choose Linux as target OS, select Professional Edition then click “Download FREE Trial” button to get the software package. You should see the figure below and vtune_amplifier_2017_update1_for_systems.dmg is the main package.
Inside this .dmg compressed file, there are one installation guide (release_notes_amplifier_for_systems_osx.pdf), VTune installation file and the release note which contains the updates(What’s New section) in 2017. Double click the VTune installation file and choose “Install as root”. You will be able to see VTune application in Launchpad as the following figure.
Since OS X 10.5 started to support ssh-agent, it’s easy to configure password-less ssh tunnel for VTune remote profiling usage.
host> cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub | ssh user@target 'cat >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys'
By performing the commands above, you can easily establish a password-less ssh tunnel between host and target machines after. For the version earlier than OS X 10.5, you may need to copy the VTune result files/folder back to the host from target machine and open the result files via VTune GUI to perform the analysis task on host machine. Winscp is one of useful GUI tools for performing scp command.
As the following figure shows, our example profiling target is running Ubuntu Linux. You need to choose “remote Linux(SSH)”, fill-in the target’s IP address/user account for Analysis Target, and give application name you plan to profile. After that, you can select basic hotspot analysis type, advanced hotspot or other analysis types for Analysis type, then click start to start collecting the performance logs remotely.
Once the log collection process is done. ( you can setup the collection time range or stop the collection whenever you like). VTune will display these profiling data with its unique way. The following screenshot is VTune’s major UI for performance analysis. For further reading and details, you can visit its online training page.
Trouble shooting
As the figure shows, VTune UI of host machine detects incompatible version of data collector on the remote target. Each release version of VTune package will contain the performance log viewer (GUI) and the corresponding target files ( data collectors, kernel drivers). The solution of this issue is to deploy the matched target files in the target machine.