Configuration

The Autotools integration plugins add support for running a configuration step prior to running the Makefile of existing projects that use a configure or autogen.sh script.

Maintenance

The Autotools plugins include colourized editors for configure scripts including hover help and completion for macros.

Project Templates

The GNU Autotools plug-in provides template projects for both C and C++ in the CDT C and C++ Project Wizards. There are two templates for each language: an empty project template used when importing existing projects and a sample "Hello World" project template. The "Hello World" sample project templates provide all needed source and configuration files such that the build produces a working executable that prints to the console.

Autotools Configuration

The configuration settings can be found under the Autotools properties page. Configuration options write and store a new project xml file: .autotools. Note that the build directory is not specified in the configuration settings, it is specified exclusively using the "Build Location" setting found in the C/C++ Build properties page.

If the build location is not set, then by default, the initial build will occur in the top-level project directory. Subsequent builds will build in new directories which are named "build-${CfgName}" where ${CfgName} is the name of the configuration. If this behaviour is not desired, it can be turned off from the top-level Autotools property page.

For further information about rewrite changes, click here.

Source code parsing

The ChangeLog tools assist in generating ChangeLog entries. Pressing the key combination Ctrl-Alt-c will parse the current file and add a ChangeLog entry in the appropriate ChangeLog file. C, C++, and Java source files are parsed to indicate methods/functions which have been modified, added or removed. Hold Ctrl and click on one of the files to jump to that file in the Editor.

Repository integration

The ChangeLog tools can generate a ChangeLog entry for projects that use a source code repository. Support is provided for standard org.eclipse.team providers and has been tested with both CVS and SVN repositories. A ChangeLog entry can be generated for all changes between the local copy and the repository by pressing Ctrl+Alt+p.

Filename Support Improvements

Previously files with blanks in their names or parentheses or colons caused the ChangeLog parser to misinterpret the actual file name vs the function name. This would prevent a Ctrl-click from opening files properly. This is now fixed and files with such names will show up with escape characters automatically added. Ctrl-click now works on these files.

Multiple files per entry

The plugin now allows entries that have multiple files specified in one entry. The multiple file names are separated by commas and can continue on multiple lines. This is useful when there is one change made on a large group of files. The Ctrl-click feature works on each file.

C++ Support

The Libhover Libstdc++ feature adds C++ hover help for the libstdc++ library.

Standards

The Libhover plugin adds C library hover help and completion support for various C libraries including glibc and newlib. The plugin provides an extension and a documentation format for adding new C libraries in the future.

Manual Profiling

The Manual Profiling option makes your profiling more controlled and more precise. Use the Manual option to start and stop the Oprofile daemon at will.

Eclipse Help User Guide

The OProfile user guide is available via a link in the Eclipse Help System.

Timer Interrupt Profiling

The plugin will now work with OProfile's timer interrupt-based profiling. This happens automatically when the host CPU has no debug registers, or can be forced by manually loading the OProfile module with:

# modprobe oprofile timer=1

Multi-Architecture Support

The plugin includes fragments to support PPC, x86 and x86_64 for use with their respective processors.

New View

The OProfile plugin gives users a way to statistically profile a C/C++ application at runtime. It makes use of the OProfile commandline tool to collect data on function calls and time spent within functions. The plugin includes a way to view the results of oprofile runs. Events are top level elements allowing multiple events to be shown simultaneously. Double-clicking on a line number node brings up an editor with the source file at the appropriate line (if available). Double-clicking on the default session (named "current") allows it to be saved for future viewing.

One Click Launch

Profiling is as easy as a single click. Right-clicking on a CDT binary, project or editor of a source file will launch the associated project's binary under OProfile with no configuration needed. Configuration is set to appropriate defaults for the user's processor (an event based on execution time) and this configuration is left for the user to customize later.

Event Config Tab UI

Allows users of all experience levels with OProfile to take advantage of its powerful profiling capabilities. Default event configuration option. Multiple hardware counters appear as tabs. All unit masks properly displayed with appropriate defaults. Caching of event check results allowing for faster validation. Scrollable composite for events with many unit masks.

Multi-threaded profiling

Callgraph can now trace function calls in multi-threaded programs. No difference in terms of the user interface, but now when graphing Callgraph will automatically track which functions belong to which thread and display them accordingly.

Convert To DOT Language

Eclipse Callgraph can save graphs to the DOT language. In Eclipse Callgraph, click the main menu and choose File -> Save As, then choose an option to save parts of the graph or the whole graph as a .dot file. Graphs in DOT language can then be graphed or converted to other formats (e.g. PDF, SVG, etc.) by any of a large number of existing DOT parsing programs.

Visualize C/C++ Projects

Graphically displays the call hierarchy from executing a C/C++ binary, along with various other runtime statistics.

Link To Function Source

The graph views are linked to their source code. This means that from any view, one can jump directly to the relevant source code by holding Ctrl and double clicking a node.

Architecture coverage

GProf plugins now support 64-bit gmon files (bug #304163).

Visualization

GProf profiling results can now more easily be viewed using a BIRT-drive visualization.

Configuration

The Gprof plugin allows the generation of execution performance statistics based on compiler instrumentation. Thus, the user has to compile the C/C++ program with profiling enabled using the -pg option prior to running the tool.

Launching

Once the application run is finished, a gmon.out file is generated under the project. Double clicking on this file will open a dialog to select the associated binary.

Results

The Gprof view shows which parts of the program consume most of the execution time. It also provides call graph infomation for each function. Source code can be viewed in an editor by double clicking on a function in the tree.

Code coverage

GCov code coverage output files can now be visualized in Eclipse. An application compiled with "-fprofile-arcs" "-ftest-coverage" and linked with "-fprofile-arcs" will generate 2 coverage output files (*.gcda/*.gcno) for each source file of the program. Double clicking on one of these files provides an overview of coverage for the whole program. In addition, source files are annotated with lines covered their frequency of execution.

Generation

The RPM Stubby plugin assists in generating an RPM specfile for an Eclipse feature by using the data in its feature.xml. The plugin uses the latest best practices for packaging an Eclipse feature as an RPM.

Robustness

Uses %global macro instead of %define. See here for details.

Improved Maven projects support

Proper install for jars in a pom project and make use of the %{_mavenpomdir} macro.

Maven generation

RPM Stubby can generate RPM spec files directly from Maven pom.xml files.

Download sources

Sometimes when working with an RPM spec file it is necessary to download any referenced sources. The RPM .spec editor makes this easy by allowing sources defined in the spec file to be downloaded directly from inside Eclipse.

SRPM Import

SRPM import wizard creates RPM project directly instead of running the generic new project.

Form based editor

The editor has a form-based editor that supports a number of sections and tags.

Convert tabs to spaces

Automatically replace tabs with a predefined number of spaces using a preference setting.

RPM project support

The editor includes a wizard that creates RPM projects with standard rpmbuild directory structure to facilitate setting up RPM projects.

Rpmlint markers for .spec files

The RPM .spec editor comes with an option to run RPMLint on spec files. The RPMLint option will run the rpmlint tool and mark warnings/errors on the spec file.

Structured compare support

Structured compare has been added for ease of use with version control systems.

%global definition support

Support for %global way of defining variables. For details about why %global should be preferred over %define see here.

Fully-featured editor

The RPM .spec editor is a fully featured editor for spec files. It includes context-sensitive autocompletion support, syntax highlighting, quick fixes, hover-help and other features designed to make editing spec files easier.

Valgrind 3.5 Support

Valgrind 3.5 brings several changes to the tool suite, such as improved leak checking. For the Linux Tools 0.4 release, an issue has been corrected that prevented launching a program successfully with default Valgrind options. Valgrind 3.5 users should now have no problems profiling their C/C++ applications in Eclipse.

Customize Valgrind Location

A new preference setting specifies an alternate location for the Valgrind executable. Now you can use Valgrind from a non-standard location without having to manipulate your PATH environment variable! By default this will be set to the path returned by the which command. The preference page can be found in Window -> Preferences .

Suppression File Editor

For Valgrind tools that output a series of errors, there can often be a lot of noise — errors you are not interested in. Valgrind has the capability of using Suppressions to ignore such errors. The syntax for defining Suppression Files can be found here.

Now an editor for Valgrind Suppression files has been created and will be used for files ending with the ".supp" extension. It features context-sensitive syntax highlighting (for instance only highlighting the word "Memcheck" when used to define the tool relating to the Suppression), code folding and completion. Completion is very useful to select from the full range of Memcheck Suppression types.

Currently only Memcheck is supported in the editor as it is the only tool of these plugins that uses Suppressions.

Export Massif Chart

The allocation chart produced by the Massif plugin can now be exported as an SVG.

Massif Chart Interactivity

A new interactivity feature has been added to Massif's heap allocation charts. As before, single-clicking on a data point in the chart selects that snapshot in the Valgrind view. Now you can double-click on a data point that is a detailed snapshot to open an editor for one of its allocation function calls. This feature considers all of the locations in your project's sources that call an allocation function such as malloc or new. If your project contains functions that serve as wrappers to allocation functions, be sure to add them to the list of allocation functions in the launch configuration. This will ensure you get the most meaningful profiling results.

Fold Valgrind results

To help manage large amounts of profiling results, all three tools offer a new "Expand/Collapse Beneath Selection" feature in their tree viewers. Accessible from the viewer's context menu, this will expand (or collapse) all items beneath the selected element.

Cachegrind Integration

A Cachegrind plugin allows users to profile the cache and branch behaviour of their program. A hierarchical breakdown of these statistics is presented in a tree for easy navigation and sorting.

Memcheck Integration

Support for Memcheck, the memory error-checking tool, includes a tree view of errors and their corresponding stack trace. Stack frames can be double-clicked to show the given line in an editor. Markers annotate the corresponding source code.

Massif Integration

Massif integration consists of three different forms of output. A table view lists each heap snapshot taken. Of these snapshots, some have more detailed information available, including a call trace of the functions performing heap allocations in each snapshot. This extended information is available in a tree view accessible either by double clicking on a snapshot with the "tree" icon, or by clicking the similar icon in the Valgrind view's toolbar. Within the tree view, allocation functions found in source files can be viewed in an editor by double clicking on the element in the tree. Finally, there is a heap chart displayed in an editor that graphically outlines the information provided in the snapshots. Clicking on a point in the chart selects the snapshot in the table.

SystemTap Dashboard

The Dashboard Perspective is the most advanced part of SystemTap GUI. It is designed to allow users to browse and run prebuilt modules in order to see multiple graphs updating in sequence.The dashboard allows for visualizing specific system activities graphically.

SystemTap dashboard

Removed server dependency

The SystemTap GUI server is now redundant. SystemTap scripts can be executed remotely using remote ssh.

SystemTap IDE

Linux Tools encompasses a fully-featured IDE for the SystemTap language. This includes a SystemTap editor and views that list available systemtap probes, systemtap functions and the kernel source code. Code completion, code folding, context-assistance and highlighting are all included in the IDE.

SystemTap Graphs

The SystemTap IDE is can display the output of SystemTap scripts as dynamic graphs. Graphs are created on-the-fly and according to user specifications.

Histogram View

The new LTTng Histogram view replaces the old Time Frame View

Performance

The performance and responsiveness of the LTTng plugins has greatly improved.