Intel® VTune™ Profiler User Guide

User Guide

Contents

Search Directories

Search directories are used to locate supporting files and display analysis information in relation to your source code.
In some cases, the
Intel® VTune™
Profiler
 cannot locate the supporting user files necessary for displaying analysis information and you may need to configure additional search locations or override standard ones. This is required for
.exe
 projects on Windows* created out of Microsoft Visual Studio*, where no information about project directory structure is available, for C++ projects with a third party library for which you wish to define binaries/sources, or for the imported projects with the data collected remotely. When you run a remote data collection, the
VTune
Profiler
 copies binary files from the target system to the host by default. You need to either copy symbol and source files to the host or mount a directory with these files.
VTune
Profiler
 searches the directories in the particular order when finalizing the collected data. For the
VTune
Profiler
 integrated into the Visual Studio IDE, the search directories are defined by the Microsoft Visual Studio C++ project properties.
For successful module resolution, the
VTune
Profiler
 needs to locate the following files:
  • binaries (executables and dynamic libraries)
  • symbols
  • source files
It automatically locates the files for C/C++ projects that are not moved after building the application and collecting the performance data.

Configure Search Directories

To configure search directories:
  1. Click the
    Configure Analysis
     toolbar button.
    The
    Configure Analysis
     window opens.
  2. Click the
    Search Sources/Binaries
     button at the bottom to open the corresponding dialog box and specify paths for symbol, binary and source files for the file resolution
    on the host
    .
  3. To add a new search directory in the
    Search Directories
     table, click the
    <Add a new search location>
     row and type in the path and name of the directory in the activated text box, or click the browse button on the right to select a directory from the list. For example, if your project was initially located in
    /work/projects/my_project
     on Linux* and then was moved to
    /home/user/my_project_copy
    , you need to specify the
    /home/user/my_project_copy
     as a search directory for binary/symbol and source files.
The search is non-recursive. Make sure to specify all required directories.
If the search directories were not configured properly and modules were not resolved, you may see the following:
  • In the
    Summary
     window, you see a pop-up message starting with "
    Data is not complete due to missing symbol information for user modules
    ...". This pop-up window provides shortcut options to specify search directories and re-resolve the analysis result.
  • In the
    Bottom-up
     or
    Top-down Tree
     pane, the module shows only one
    [Unknown]
     line instead of meaningful lines with function names.
  • When you double-click a row to view the related source code, you get a Cannot find the source file window asking you to locate the source file.
If the
VTune
Profiler
 cannot locate symbol files for system modules, it may provide incomplete stack information in the
Bottom-up
/
Top-down Tree
 panes and
Call Stack
 pane. In this case, you may see
[Unknown frame(s)]
 hotspots when attributing system layers to user code using the
Call Stack Mode
 option on the filter toolbar. To avoid this for Windows targets, make sure to configure the Microsoft symbol server or set the
_NT_SYMBOL_PATH
 environment variable. For Linux targets, enable Linux kernel analysis.

Product and Performance Information

1

Performance varies by use, configuration and other factors. Learn more at www.Intel.com/PerformanceIndex.