ElectricAccelerator ElectricInsight Release Notes, Version 5.5

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Product Description

ElectricInsight® is a reporting and visualization tool for ElectricAccelerator®. ElectricInsight (”Insight”) reads an annotation file, which is produced by Electric Make® (”eMake”), to provide a graphical representation of the build structure for performance analysis. Insight provides detailed information and reports for each job on each host in the build cluster. Insight shows how a build is structured and run, which lets you find performance problems or conflicts in a parallel build.

You can use Insight for at-a-glance diagnostics by examining which jobs are being performed, when they are being performed, and the files that are associated with them. You can also use Insight to help identify makefile problems and compare certain differences between an annotation file and a file from a similar build to help solve performance, job cache misses, and other issues. Insight is a simpler alternative to examining the file itself to find errors and tune performance.

What’s New or Modified

New Features and Functionality

ebitbake Command

The ebitbake command is introduced. This command applies acceleration to BitBake builds such as Yocto Project builds. It provides caching for BitBake do_configure tasks as well as caching and build acceleration for do_compile steps. For details, see the KBEA-00171 - Using eMake to Accelerate BitBake Builds Using ElectricAccelerator 11.0.1 KB article. (EC-12908 and EI-801)

Enhanced Reports for BitBake Builds The following reports now provide better information for BitBake builds:

  • Job Time by Type Report

  • Job Cache Misses Report

  • Longest Jobs Report

  • Export Timeline Report

  • Why Rebuild Report

    “Why rebuild” data is available only for jobs incorporated from eMake annotation (not for “jobs” created to represented unaccelerated BitBake tasks).

For details about these reports, see the “Reports” chapter of the ElectricAccelerator 5.5 ElectricInsight User Guide at Insight 5.5 User Guide. Note that running reports in Insight requires an Insight license.

These reports require that you create a single “pseudo-annotation” file from an ElectricAccelerator BitBake build and load the file into Insight. See the following section for more information. (EI-801)

Single “Pseudo-Annotation” Files for BitBake Builds

The bb2anno utility is introduced to facilitate better analysis with Insight. You use this utility to combine the individual annotation files for each BitBake package and task created by the ebitbake command along with other buildstats data into a single “pseudo-annotation file” for importing into Insight. For details about using the bb2anno utility, see the KBEA-00171 - Using eMake to Accelerate BitBake Builds Using ElectricAccelerator 11.0.1 KB article. (EC-12908 and EI-801)

Other New Features and Functionality

The functionality provided by the Go to graph button in the Job Details dialog is more visible and easier to use. (EI-803)

Job classification is enhanced to identify jobs correctly by command when the command names have prefixes. For example, Insight now identifies “x86-pc-linux-gnu-gcc” as an invocation of “gcc”. (EI-802)

Resolved Issues

None.

Known Issues

None.

Documentation

The ElectricInsight User Guide is available online. To view the user guide, choose Help > User Guide in the Insight application or read it online along with the rest of the ElectricInsight documentation on the CloudBees Accelerator product documentation page.

These documents are updated periodically.