2. Compiling vprof

2.1 Prerequisites

• The Qt GUI Toolkit Version 2 is needed to build vprof. If you do not wish to use Qt, you can use the command line interface, cprof, instead. The configuration script looks for the Qt installation in /usr/local/qt and then in the system directories, but you can override this when configuring vprof. Qt 2.0.1 is provided with RedHat 6.1, but you may still need to install the qt and qt-devel packages from the RedHat distribution.
• The profil system call conforming to SysVr4 is needed to obtain statistical profile information. On Linux this is provided by the GNU C Library. C library version 2.0.7 with version 2.2.2 of the Linux kernel is known to work. Many other combinations should work as well.
• The perfctr package is not required but on P6 systems running Linux it will allow you to sample a wide range of system events. To use this package your system must support the APIC. vprof has been tested with perfctr-2.1 and linux-2.4.8-ac7. See the --with-perfctr configure option for how to configure vprof to use the perfctr package.
• The PerfAPI package is not required but on certain architectures will allow you to sample a wide range of system events.
• The GNU binary file descriptor library is needed to convert program counter values to line numbers in the source code. If counts are not showing up on the right line numbers, try upgrading your version of binutils. If you install binutils yourself, be sure to install libintl.a as well (in the intl subdirectory of binutils), since it is required and not installed by default.
• gunzip is needed to uncompress the archive
• gmakeis required since extensions specific to GNU make are used.

2.2 Obtaining vprof

The latest version of vprof and this document can be found on the vprof home page. Retrieve the tar file vprof-0.12.tar.gz and extract it with the following command

gunzip < vprof-0.12.tar.gz | tar xvf -

This will create a directory called vprof-0.12

2.3 Configuring vprof

The vprof package can be compiled in the source directory, vprof-0.12, created in the previous step, or you can make architecture specific directories for each machine for which you wish to compile vprof. To do the latter, create and change into the directory in which you want the object code and executable placed (e.g. vprof.i386) and run the configure script in the vprof-0.12 source code directory. All the make commands should be run from the object code directory.

The configure script takes several optional arguments that give the location of packages and commands that are used to build vprof:

• --with-prefix=install directory

  Specify the install directory.

• --with-cxx=C++ compiler

  Specify the C++ compiler.

• --with-cc=C compiler

  Specify the C compiler.

• --with-include="-Iinclude_directory ..."

  Give include directories.

• --with-ldflags="-Llibrary_directory ..."

  Give linker options.

• --with-qt=Qt directory

  Specify the directory where Qt is installed.

• --with-perfctr=Linux source directory

  Specify the directory for the Linux source, patched to support perfctr. The default is to not use perfctr.

• --with-papi=PAPI directory

  Specify the directory where PAPI is installed.

• --disable-runtime

  Do not build the runtime objects or library.

• --with-sizeof-ull

  Specifies the size of unsigned long long when cross compiling.

• --with-sizeof-ul

  Specifies the size of unsigned long when cross compiling.

• --with-sizeof-ui

  Specifies the size of unsigned int when cross compiling.

• --with-sizeof-us

  Specifies the size of unsigned short when cross compiling.

• --with-sizeof-vp

  Specifies the size of void * when cross compiling.

• --disable-tools

  Do not build the analysis tools.

You do not have to have Qt, PAPI, or X windows. Without Qt, only cprof will be built which provides a command line interface to the profiling information.

2.4 Testing vprof

Several test directories are provided to test various aspects of vprof. These tests are not run or compiled by default. Some of the tests may not compile for a given installation, depending on the system and configuration options. The following tests are available:

• test1

  Tests having multiple source files in multiple directories.

• test2

  Basic C++ tests.

• test3

  Tests having source code in include files.

• test4

  Tests the FORTRAN API.

• test5

  Tests interoperability with POSIX threads.

• test6

  Tests interoperability with MPI.

• test7

  Tests interoperability with MPI/PMPI.