SKY Logo TimeTrac Event Analyzer

TimeTrac 2.0 Release Notes
03/14/11

Summary

This is TimeTrac Version 2.0; the first release of the standalone version of SKY's TimeTrac Event Analyzer.

TimeTrac consists of two easy-to-use parts:

You should read these Release Notes in their entirety before starting the TimeTrac software install.

System Reqirements

To link with the TimeTrac library:

To use the TimeTrac viewer, you must have:

To Install TimeTrac

You may not install or use this software except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at www.skycomputers.com/Software/TimeTrac_SW_Lic.html

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" basis, without warranties or conditions of any kind, either express or implied. refer to the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.

You may install TimeTrac from files copied from CD or from the web; refer to the procedure below for installation. You must have root privileges to install the TimeTrac software into the system directories. The install script will ask if you want to install into system directories. A positive response will do the following:

Or you may elect to install these files manually into directories of your choice. To uninstall TimeTrac, you must manually remove these files.

You may install TimeTrac from a compressed tar file by following this procedure. All of the required files are included on the CDROM.
  1. Log into the system as root. 
          su root                 ;; requires root password
  2. Create a clean directory in the location of your choice and copy the compressed tar file (TimeTrac-2.0.tgz) and the install script (install) from their current location to this directory. Create or select another directory to hold the example programs. 
          cp   ...../wherever/TimeTrac-2.0.tgz   ...../clean_dir/.
      cp   ...../wherever/install   ...../clean_dir/.
  3. Go to the directory we just copied the files to: 
          cd ...../clean_dir      ;; as above
  4. Execute the install script from this directory: 
          ./install             ;; and respond to the questions asked
  5. This install script will ask you where to install the TimeTrac example programs and Timetrac system files. The directory you select must exist and you must have read/write access to it. It should also be clean and contain no other files or subdirectories. Use the directory you created or decided on above and enter a fully qualified pathname.

  6. The install script will ask you if you wish the 32-bit or 64-bit version of TimeTrac to be installed. Select the one that matches your Linux distribution. (uname -m ending in _64 indicates a 64-bit version.)

  7. The install script will attempt to discover your Motif libraries, if any. You may use your existing installation by answering No, or install Motif from the included open source tar file by answering Yes.

  8. If all the necessary files are present, the script will relink TimeTrac. If the relink fails, the install script will terminate and you must manually install the missing components and then relink TimeTrac.

  9. You will be asked if you want to install the TimeTrac files into the system directories. You should do this if you are developing applications on this system. If you do not install TimeTrac into the system directories, you must manually copy the TimeTrac files into the directories of your choice: 
    	TimeTrac              ;; This is the viewer executable. It should be
                              ;; copied to a location in your search path
	time_trac.h           ;; This is the TimeTrac include file that your
                              ;; application code must include.
	libtime_trac.a        ;; This library file must be used when you link
                              ;; your application
  10. If a CD was used, remove the CD and store in a safe place when done, 
    	cd /                  ;; you may not be attached to the CD
	eject                 ;; if this is the default device
  11. For the example directory, set the permissions appropriately for your environment depending on who will be allowed to rebuild and execute the examples. Failure to do so may cause the examples to not build.
Motif Libraries:
TimeTrac requires the Motif run-time library. If you do not have it installed on your system, you should use the appropiate package manager and install it from the web.

A copy of the OpenMotif source tar file has been included in this release but on some systems, this does not build completely. If necessary, you should get the latest version from the web and rebuild with that. We suggest that you rebuild the Motif library only if it is not currently installed on your system.

If you have installed the library but get the following error when you run TimeTrac:
TimeTrac: error while loading shared libraries:
libXm.so.4: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
You should link your version of the library to libXm.so.4.
If the TimeTrac executable still fails to run:
Review the suggestions below for the various Linux distributions.

The TimeTrac Viewer and Different Distributions

On current Linux distributions, the usb device drive is part of the kernel and usbfs is no longer supported. This may cause the usb dongle to not work properly. It may be necessary to execute the following commands as a workaround:

sudo mount --bind   /dev/bus   /proc/bus
sudo ln -s   /sys/kernel/debug/usb/devices   /proc/bus/usb/devices

The TimeTrac Viewer and Older Distributions

If the TimeTrac viewer fails to run, you may need to review the following list. On Ubuntu, you may need to do the following (or use the appropiate package manager): 

  sudo apt-get pmount
and then a system restart.

Verify that the proper USB device drivers are loaded. On a typical system use the lsmod command to view the installed drivers. The output should be similar to: 

  # lsmod | grep _hcd
  ehci_hcd               50572  0 
  ohci_hcd               38020  0 
  usbcore               155816  5 usb_storage,usbhid,ehci_hcd,ohci_hcd
If necessary (they did not appear in the list, above), load the device drivers: 
  insmod usbcore
  insmod uhci_hcd 
  insmod ehci_hcd
and mount the usb file system. 
  mount -t usbfs -o devmode=0666 none /proc/bus/usb
To automatically mount the usbfs filesystem each time the system is booted, you must manually add the following to /etc/fstab 
  none  /proc/bus/usb  usbfs  auto,devmode=0666  0  0
On some Linux distributions, the insertion of the TimeTrac dongle in a USB port results in the dongle not being accessible or being accessible only by root; in this case, TimeTrac will not execute or will execute only when you are root. To allow running TimeTrac as a normal user, we can: Note that you may install TimeTrac on as many machines as you want; this will:

To Collect TimeTrac Data

You must have your application instrumented with the TimeTrac calls, compiled with the time_trac.h file included and linked with the libtime_trac.a library. See the examples for additional details.

If the application build system is different from the system that you installed the TimeTrac viewer, you must copy the time_trac.h include file and the libtime_trac.a library file to convenient build directories. You do not need a "dongle" to use these files; they can be copied to as many systems as needed for application development and deployment.

To Run the TimeTrac Viewer

To run the TimeTrac viewer:

About the Examples

This installation includes a set of TimeTrac examples to help get you started. It is recommended that you review each of these examples and code fragments prior to instrumenting your own application. The examples include the following:



Last Update 03/14/11