Intel® VTune™ Amplifier

Sampling Drivers

Intel® VTune™ Amplifier uses kernel drivers to enable the hardware event-based sampling. VTune Amplifier installer automatically uses the Sampling Driver Kit to build drivers for your kernel with the default installation options. If the drivers were not built and set up during installation (for example, lack of privileges, missing kernel development RPM, and so on), VTune Amplifier provides an error message and, on Linux* and Android* systems, enables driverless sampling data collection based on the Linux Perf* tool functionality, which has a limited scope of analysis options. But you may still enable a full-scale sampling data collection by building/installing the sampling drivers.

Depending on your target system, you can manage the sampling drivers as follows:

Note

  • You may need kernel header sources and other additional software to build and load the kernel drivers on Linux. For details, see the README.txt file in the sepdk/src directory.

  • A Linux kernel update can lead to incompatibility with VTune Amplifier drivers set up on the system for event-based sampling (EBS) analysis. If the system has installed VTune Amplifier boot scripts to load the drivers into the kernel each time the system is rebooted, the drivers will be automatically re-built by the boot scripts at system boot time. Kernel development sources required for driver rebuild should correspond to the Linux kernel update.

  • If you loaded the drivers but do not use them and no collection is happening, there is no execution time overhead of having the drivers loaded. The memory overhead is also minimal. You can let the drivers be loaded at boot time (for example, via the install-boot-script, which is used by default) and not worry about it. Unless data is being collected by the VTune Amplifier, there will be no latency impact on system performance.

See Also