Troubleshooting

Various problems and their solutions are described here. If you encounter a problem not described here, please file a bug.

Install Script Errors

This section describes different errors that could occur from running the install scripts (i.e. install.sh or install-noconsolehelper.sh)

Error: script must be run as the root user

You attempted to run the script as an ordinary, non-root user. You must be the root user to run the install script, as the scripts edit files located in root-owned directories.

Solution: Run the command su - to become the root user, or run the script as the root user with su -c './install.sh'.

Error: script must be run with pwd in script dir

Your current working directory must be the natives/linux/scripts subdirectory of the OProfile core plug-in; running the script relative from another location will not work.

Solution: Simply follow the steps on Step 1 - Locate the Installation Scripts to find the natives/linux/scripts subdirectory of the OProfile core plug-in.

Error: required binaries do not exist, OProfile not installed?

The OProfile plug-in could not find the oprofiled and opcontrol binaries. This could mean they are not in their default directory ( /usr/bin), or they do not exist at all.

Solution: If the binaries are on your system (and in your PATH) but not in those directories, you can either remove these checks from the install script or create symlinks in the /usr/bin directory. Of course, if the binaries do not exist on your system, then install the oprofile package.

Error: /usr/bin/consolehelper does not exist, run install-noconsolehelper.sh instead

You ran the install.sh script, but consolehelper was not installed on your system. As described in Step 2 - Choose Which Installation Script To Run, if consolehelper is not installed, then you will need to use a root authentication mode that uses the sudo mechanism.

Solution: Run the install-noconsolehelper.sh script instead.

Error: cannot create opcontrol wrapper in <directory>

The ln command reports that the symlink could not be created. This can occur if the natives/linux/scripts subdirectory is located on an NFS mount; the NFS server will not allow the local root user to create files in the directory.

Solution: Before running the install.sh script, first create the symlink as a regular user by running the command ln -s /usr/bin/consolehelper opcontrol. Then, remove the following section from the install.sh script:

#create the sym link to consolehelper
test -L ./opcontrol || { rm -f ./opcontrol && ln -s /usr/bin/consolehelper opcontrol ; }
if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
  echo Error: cannot create opcontrol wrapper in `pwd`
  exit 1
fi

The install.sh script is fixed in the most recent version of the OProfile plug-in for Eclipse, but not in the 0.2.0 release.

Error: cannot find opxml binary, required plugin missing (Deprecated)

NOTE: As of Linux Tools version 0.7.0 opxml is NOT required anymore.

This can occur if the native binary opxml is not found. This binary is required for proper operation of the oprofile plug-in version < 0.7.0 plug-in. opxml is not required for oprofile >= 0.7.0.

Solution: If the org.eclipse.linuxtools.oprofile.core.linux.{x86,x86_64,ppc} directories exist (in the Eclipse plugins directory), refer to the Rebuilding opxml section for instructions on rebuilding the binary and placing it in the proper directory. Otherwise, re-install the plug-in.

No Samples From A Profile

It is possible for a profile run of a program to return no samples, resulting in no current session displayed. This is not always indicative of a problem with either OProfile or the profiled program. OProfile is a system-wide profiling tool; hence, other active processes running on your system may overshadow your program. This is particularly true if the profiled program is not CPU intensive.

In addition, the Event you choose (selected through the Events tab, as described in Regular Mode) could cause a profile to return no samples; for example the event BR_CND_MISSP_EXEC will only provide samples if a branch was mispredicted by the processor. Note also that due to the statistical nature of OProfile, profiling is neither deterministic nor consistent; two subsequent runs may output very different results. In some cases, one run can result in no samples, while another run on the same program can result in many samples. The OProfile online documentation has other useful information here.

Solution: The following suggestions could help you generate more samples from a profile run:

If you are unsure whether your configuration is working correctly, try profiling the sample project in the Example Project section.

Log Reader Hangs

If the OProfile daemon log file is too large, the log reader may hang and possibly cause the OProfile plug-in to crash. This occurs when the verbosity option is set to all, which results in several hundred MiB of text in the log over several profile runs. If you do require all this data in the log file, do not launch the log reader. Delete or backup the log file before running the log reader again.

NOTE: As of Linux Tools version 0.7.0 opxml is NOT required anymore.

opxml is the native program that bridges OProfile and the OProfile plug-in for Eclipse. In some cases, some errors may be caused by problems with opxml. To verify if this is the case, run opxml.

opxml is normally located in the Eclipse plugins directory, similar to the install scripts described in Step 1 - Locate the Installation Scripts. However, depending on your platform, the location of opxml will be different. To determine what your platform is, run the following command at a terminal:

 uname -m

Depending on the output, locate the following directory in the same manner as Step 1 - Locate the Installation Scripts, and change into that directory:

Output from uname -m Directory to use in find command Sub-directory to change to
i386, i468, i568, i686, x86 org.eclipse.linuxtools.oprofile.core.linux.x86 os/linux/x86
x86_64 org.eclipse.linuxtools.oprofile.core.linux.x86_64 os/linux/x86_64
ppc, ppc64 org.eclipse.linuxtools.oprofile.core.linux.ppc os/linux/ppc

For example, if you are running Eclipse on a 64bit machine (i.e. x86_64), you should run the following command to find the location of opxml:

 $ find /home/ksebasti/eclipse -name 'org.eclipse.linuxtools.oprofile.core.linux.x86_64_*'

This will display the following output (or similar):

 /home/ksebasti/eclipse/plugins/org.eclipse.linuxtools.oprofile.core.linux.x86_64_0.2.0.200904201514

Navigate into that directory:

 $ cd /home/ksebasti/eclipse/plugins/org.eclipse.linuxtools.oprofile.core.linux.x86_64_0.2.0.200904201514/os/linux/x86_64

Once you have navigated to the right directory, run the following command:

 ./opxml info

Check that the paths in the defaults section are correct. If the output is similar to the output of the command ophelp, but formatted as XML, then this might not be the problem. However, if running opxml produces an error, it may be the root cause. A common error on some systems is that they use an older version of the C runtime libraries (i.e. glibc). Refer to Rebuilding opxml for a solution to this error.

In any case, if there is an error please look for an existing bug or if one does not exist, file a new bug.

Rebuilding opxml (Deprecated)

NOTE: As of Linux Tools version 0.7.0 opxml is NOT required anymore.

You will need to rebuild the opxml binary if running it returns an error similar to the following:

 opxml: /some/path/libc.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.8' not found (required by opxml)

Warning: this is rarely necessary; in some cases, rebuilding the opxml binary may break an otherwise working OProfile plug-in installation. You should only rebuild the opxml binary if you are sure that doing so is the only remaining option in fixing the OProfile plug-in for Eclipse.

To rebuild the opxml binary, perform the following steps

  1. Follow the exact same steps as Step 1 - Locate the Installation Scripts, except instead of changing to the natives/linux/scripts sub-directory, change to the natives/linux/opxml sub-directory of the core plugin. The source files for the opxml binary should be located here.
  2. Rebuilding opxml requires make, g++, the libbfd libraries and the OProfile development libraries. In Fedora, the oprofile-devel package contains the OProfile development libraries; for information about the OProfile development libraries in Ubuntu, refer to Ubuntu - Extra Requirements.
  3. Run make to build the binary.
  4. Run make install to install the binary into the correct plug-in directory.
  5. Run make clean to remove the extra files created during the build process.

Ubuntu - Extra Requirements

Ubuntu and other Debian-based systems do not provide the OProfile development libraries in their packaging management system, so we must build them by hand. To do so, perform the following steps:

  1. Install the packages binutils-dev and libpopt-dev.
  2. Download the OProfile source.
  3. Unpack the OProfile source tarball.
  4. Run the configure tool.
  5. Compile the required libraries.
  6. Move the libraries into the include path.

The required libraries should now be in the proper place for compiling. Continue the steps in the Rebuilding opxml section.

Note: The procedure for building the OProfile development libraries for Ubuntu (described in this section) was tested on Ubuntu 10.04 with Eclipse, the CDT, oprofile and all its dependencies already installed via apt.