Intel releases VTune 2.0 for linux

[Will Cohen]

Vincent wrote:
> http://www.intel.com/software/products/vtune/vlin/
> 
> says it works on fedora for UP and SMP kernels
> "2.4.22-*.nptl (Red Hat Fedora* Core 1) (some limitations)"
> 
> Anyone use this software? 
> Know what they mean by "(some limitations)"?
> Has it significantly helped performance on any of your projects?
> 
> I'm trying to download the Trial but it says I have to wait one business
> day for some conformation e-mail. So I'm hoping for some stories.

Fedora Core 1 has OProfile, a sampling profiler that also uses the 
processor's performance monitoring hardware. The SMP kernels have the 
OProfile support enabled. Install the OProfile rpm in Fedora Core 1, the 
SMP kernel, and boot the SMP kernel and you should be able to use 
oprofile to collect profiling data.

The UP kernels do not have OProfile enabled because some laptops have 
problems with the local apic support. However, there are some laptops 
that the SMP kernel works fine on.

OProfile has been used to find performance problems in Red Hat applications:

http://people.redhat.com/wcohen/wwc2003/
http://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/classpath/2003-08/msg00004.html

Fixing the performance problems identified by OProfile yielded about 15% 
reduction in the build time for mozilla on ia64 (wwc2003 paper). In the 
second URL OProfile identified a significant performance problem in the 
exception handling library used by gcj and yielded a much faster version 
of the Eclipse IDE.

-Will