A New User Interface for VTune Amplifier Search Directories

With the recent updates to Intel’s VTune™ Amplifier XE 2013, the user interface for the symbol search directories has been streamlined.  The new interface should facilitate faster symbol lookups and quicker finalization waits.  You can find the new interface in the project properties dialog.

Where before there was a single tab, now there are two, separating source paths from binary and symbol paths.  The recursive search flag has also been removed.  In normal practice the files of interest are usually coalesced into just a few directories, which can be listed explicitly, and not having to do a recursive search through directory trees simplifies and speeds the lookup code.

The search tabs look much the same as before:

You can either click on the “Add new search location” and type in a path, or you can click on the ellipsis button on the right end to bring up a file browser

The Binary/Symbol search tab looks very similar:

Here you can enumerate the locations of various libraries that may be linked to your program.  In this example the source path also contains binaries with symbols, so that path is replicated here.  In addition, the path to expose the Intel^® Manycore Platform Software Stack (Intel^® MPSS), our name for the Linux kernel that comes with the Intel Xeon Phi™ coprocessor, is shown above.  With this path added to the list, events accumulated in kernel functions will be listed by function in the resulting displays.  And here are some other useful paths for providing symbols for common libraries used on the coprocessor: