Intel® VTune™ Amplifier

Driverless Event-Based Sampling Collection

To enable full-scale hardware event-based sampling analysis on your platform, the Intel® VTune™ Amplifier uses sampling drivers that require root privileges for installation on the Linux* and Android* systems.

If, for some reasons, the sampling drivers cannot be installed (for example, you do not have root privileges on the system) with the product installation, the VTune Amplifier uses the Perf* utility, which is part of the default VTune Amplifier installation package, and runs the hardware event-based sampling analysis in the driverless mode.

Note

VTune Amplifier is installed to your default account. For non-root users, it provides a notification during the installation claiming that the sampling driver cannot be installed, so some product features could be limited or unavailable. To have the sampling driver installed, you need to re-start the install process under the root account or contact your administrator.

Prerequisites for Driverless Collection

VTune Amplifier can use the driverless Perf-based collection if the following requirements are satisfied:

Driverless Collection Modes

VTune Amplifier supports the following Perf-based collection types:

To configure system-wide driverless collection:

Set the /proc/sys/kernel/perf_event_paranoid value to 0 or less. Root privileges are required.

Note

For the kernel modules resolution, make sure you have enough permissions to read kernel symbols information from the /proc/kallsyms file.

To check the data collection type used for your analysis:

Scroll down to the Collection and Platform Info section in the Summary window and check the Collector Type value:

Analysis Limitations

Perf-based driverless collection is applicable to all hardware event-based sampling analysis types, such as Hotspots (hardware event-based sampling mode), Microarchitecture Exploration, and Custom event-based sampling analysis types on Linux and Android OS. If the uncore events support is available on the system, the VTune Amplifier also uses the Perf collection for Memory Access, HPC Performance Characterization, and Microarchitecture Exploration analysis types with the Analyze memory bandwidth option enabled.

The following additional limitations are also possible:

Note

Run the <install-dir>/bin64/amplxe-self-checker.sh script to explore the analysis type collection abilities of your system. The script output helps recognize limitations and provides advice on fixing them.

See Also