User Guide

Intel® VTune™ Profiler User Guide

ID 766319
Date 11/07/2023
Public

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Document Table of Contents

Debug Information for Windows* Application Binaries

Intel® VTune™ Profiler requires debug information for the binary files it analyzes to obtain accurate performance data and enable source analysis.

Generate Debug Information in the PDB Format

On Windows* operating systems, debug information is provided in PDB files. Make sure both your system and application libraries/executable have PDB files.

By default, the Microsoft Visual Studio* IDE does not generate PDB information in the Release mode. For better results with the VTune Profiler, enable symbol generation manually.

To generate debug information for your binary files:

  1. Right-click your C++ project and select the Properties item in the context menu.

    The <your_project> Property Pages dialog box opens.

  2. From the Configuration drop-down list, choose the Release configuration.

    It may be already selected if your current configuration in the Visual Studio environment is Release.

  3. From the left pane, select Configuration Properties > C/C++ > General.

  4. In the Debug Information Format field, choose Program Database (/Zi).

  5. From the left pane, select Configuration Properties > Linker > Debugging.

  6. In the Generate Debug Info field, choose Generate Debug Information (/DEBUG).

  7. Click OK to close the dialog box.

  8. Compile your target application with optimizations.

NOTE:

If you configured Visual Studio to generate debug information for your files, you cannot "fix" previous results because the executable and the debug information do not match the executable you used to collect the old results.

To generate a native .PDB file for a native image of .NET* managed assembly:

Use the Native Image Generator tool (Ngen.exe) from the .NET Framework. Make sure the search directories, specified in the Binary/Symbol Search dialog box, include path to the generated .pdb file.

Generate Debug Information for SYCL Applications

To enable performance profiling and generate debug information for SYCL applications running on a GPU, make sure to compile your code with -gline-tables-only and -fdebug-info-for-profiling options.