Re: [PerfSuite-users] psprocess weirdness...

[Rick K. <rk...@nc...>]

Tirath,

> I've encountered something that seems quite weird to me...

That doesn't just seem weird - it *is* weird.  I haven't personally seen 
that before and have had no similar reports, but I'd like to learn what's 
behind it.

> I profiled a job with psrun, and it all works fine with most  
> counters, however this happens only with PAPI_L2_LDM (as far as I've  
> experienced):

Sometimes it's good to rule things out first and look more closely at 
what's remaining.  In this case, it seems to me that PAPI is not the 
source of the problem because by the time the XML document is generated, 
PAPI is out of the picture.  Its job is to accumulate sample counts that 
are attributed to particular values of the program counter.  These are 
what the XML doc produced by profiling should contain.  One could map a 
values of the program counter back to source code lines by using 
"addr2line -e EXE -f <pcvalue>".

After the XML is written, the software that comes into play is: psprocess 
itself, Tcl, and either the BFD library from GNU binutils or the addr2line 
utility (also from binutils).  So likely one of these is where things 
are heading down the wrong path.

I can't think of a reason for non-deterministic behavior like you're 
describing by the introduction of "less" into the mix.

> psprocess -e /opt/gamess_src/gamess.02.x /usr/scr/gamess.02.x.873.xml
[ no mappings ]

> psprocess -e /opt/gamess_src/gamess.02.x /usr/scr/gamess.02.x.873.xml  
> | less
[ some mappings, no source line info ]
 
> I guess this isn't really a huge problem (so long as the veracity of  
> the info is not disputed), but has anyone else experienced this weird  
> behaviour??? The last few times I tried redirecting to a text file  
> (i.e.: psprocess -e /opt/gamess_src/gamess.02.x /usr/scr/gamess.02.x. 
> 873.xml > tmp.txt) it has been working fine, but it didn't work  
> yesterday, which is how I noticed there was a problem to begin with.

I'm curious about the behavior of redirection that didn't work.  Was no 
output produced at all, or was it a similar situation of no source line 
mapping?  Also, psprocess supports an "-o" option, which should cause the 
output to be written to a file.  Does the same issue come up with that?

I'm guessing that since your file names are identical (both the executable 
and the XML document), that nothing has changed along those lines, like a 
recompile, but it doesn't hurt to verify that with you.

It might be easier to help if you could provide access to the executable 
and the XML document in question - is this possible? (only reply to me or 
place on an accessible server, of course!).  Also some information about 
the system and software - that can be gotten with the output of "psinv" 
and "psinv -x".

Rick