Features/EclipseProfilingTools

Feature Name

Eclipse Profiling Tools

Summary

We aim to bring the Linux Tools OProfile and Valgrind integration for the Eclipse IDE to Fedora.

Owner

• Name: Elliott Baron / Kent Sebastian

• Email: <ebaron at redhat> / <ksebasti at redhat>

Current status

• Targeted release: 11
• Last updated: 2009-02-19
• Percentage of completion: 75%

Detailed Description

The work being done upstream at eclipse.org is being driving by Fedora / Red Hat people. We are attempting to bring the power of various native profiling tools into the Eclipse IDE and integrate with the rest of the development environment. Our target audience is people developing with and for Linux distributions. The first group we are targetting is native application developers programming in C and C++.

Benefit to Fedora

This functionality will enhance our development environment, enabling developers who are familiar with integrated development environments to more easily move to Linux. Fedora remains at the forefront of Linux distributions containing Eclipse technology and this will enable us to continue to lead in this area.

Scope

Upstream development, testing, releases, packaging for Fedora. This feature is isolated and has nothing that depends upon it.

How To Test

We have unit tests and release tests upstream. We will package upstream releases directly and verify that test results match. Once we have releases and packages, we will put instructions here describing how package users can verify the test results against their installed packages. We will also post a simple set of steps one can follow to verify that the functionality is present and working.

Testing Valgrind Integration

Unit Testing

1. Install eclipse-valgrind package and dependencies
   • There is an obvious dependency on Valgrind which is only available on x86/x86_64 and ppc/ppc64
2. Install eclipse-subclipse if it is not already installed
3. Download this Project Set File
4. In org.eclipse.linuxtools.valgrind.memcheck.tests and org.eclipse.linuxtools.massif.tests, right click on AllTests.java and select Run As -> JUnit Plug-in Test
5. All tests should pass

Manual Testing

1. Using a new or existing C/C++ project, right click it in the Project Explorer view and select Profile As -> Profile With Valgrind
   • You can use these simple test projects. Import them via File->Import->General->Existing Projects into Workspace->Select archive file
2. The Valgrind View should appear after execution finishes, if there are any memory management errors, they will appear inside of it.
3. For further testing, right click the project again in the Project Explorer view and select Profile As -> Profile Configurations
4. Choose the Valgrind run configuration just created and select the "Valgrind Options" tab
5. Select the "Tool to run" drop-down, memcheck and massif should be listed, select massif and click "Profile"
6. The Valgrind View should appear after execution finishes, tabular heap allocation data should be shown in it. Also a line chart of this data should appear as the active editor.

User Experience

Valgrind

Screenshots of Valgrind plugins in action:

Dependencies

We will need to review EMF, create packages for BIRT (and potentially some of its dependencies should we decide to package more than just the charting framework we need for Valgrind), and create packages for the 3 Linux Tools projects this feature encompasses: the profiling framework (not end-user visible but necessary for the other two), OProfile functionality, and Valgrind functionality. Due to timeline differences between Fedora 11 and Eclipse 3.5 (May and June respectively), we will most likely continue with Eclipse 3.4.x in Fedora 11 and thus won't depend upon other features.

Contingency Plan

Continue without such functionality in the distro.

Documentation

Upstream Website

Release Notes

FIXME (nothing really needed)

Comments and Discussion

• See Talk:Features/EclipseProfilingTools

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