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Getting Started and Generating Traces

This tutorial walks through the process of importing the code examples into the Prism workspace and details the steps involved in creating a new Prism project and generating traces for it.

Setup

Once installed start up Prism by double clicking on the Prism Icon on the desktop. You will be prompted for a Workspace location into which all of the working files from your Prism session will be stored. Specify an appropriate location (you can change this later or have multiple workspaces) and click OK and Prism will load up with its welcome screen.

From the Prism Welcome Screen you may directly go to Prism User Guide, the Tutorials, create a new project and pad. To start the tutorial click the Start button that will open the Prism perspective. The views available in Eclipse will now be set to present the default Prism configuration.

Importing and building the Examples

Follow the directions in the building applications section of the reference guide in order to setup your build environment correctly for your required toolchain.

The following steps describe how to setup the tutorial code.

• Download the example workspace by clicking here and saving the Zip file to a temporary folder.
• If the Prism perspective is not open then click Prism -> Show Prism Perspective on the pull-down menu.
• Click File -> Import... on the pull-down menu to open the import wizard.
• Select General -> Existing Projects into Workspace and click next.
• Enable the Select archive file options and browse to the temporary folder where you saved examples.zip.
• Click Finish

The project should now be imported into Prism. The examples are supplied as C code and are built as a standard Eclipse CDT makefile project. Do the following.

• Double click on Tutorial_Examples -> Makefile on the Project Explorer View to display its source
• At the top of the file, remove the commenting from the include for your architecture and hit save.
• Open the relevant .make file for your architecture in the Tutorial_Examples -> Makefiles directory and modify the variables as necessary to match your toolchain setup.
• Click pull-down menu Project -> Build Project and the examples will build as specified by the Makefile.
• Check for any build errors in the Console view which appears (it will be behind the other views so click on the tab for it). Any build problems should be due to problems with the environment setup. Check that everything is where the makefile thinks it should be and repeat as necessary.
• Once successful, each directory of Tutorial_Examples should contain a file called example.

Generating and Loading Traces

Prism works by analyzing the runtime behavior of a program. The behavior is captured as a set of traces, generated by running the user executable on a simulator, which are then loaded into Prism. This trace information along with other state information is organized in Prism Analysis Definition (PAD) files and the first step of an new analysis session is to create one of these PAD files.

• In the Project Explorer, open the file tree and select the Tutorial_Examples/Data_Decomp directory.
• Click on Prism -> Create New Pad File...
• Click Finish.

A new PAD file (My.pad) is created and the contents are displayed in the PAD View. The exact layout varies depending on the toolchain being targeted by Prism but all configuration have the same basic functionality. The next step is to create traces from the executable.

• Drag the Data_Decomp directory into the Simulator working directory field.
• Drag Data_Decomp/example into the Executable file field.
• Click Invoke Simulator and wait as the simulator runs and the trace files are processed by Prism.

Once the traces are loaded the PAD View switches to show the Histogram View of the program trace. At this point the raw trace from the simulator has been processed and the results are stored in Prism Intermediate Trace (PIT) files managed by the PAD. This means that it is not necessary to rerun the simulation every time Prism is closed and restarted unless the executable itself has been modified. Try the following:

• Save the PAD file by clicking the disk icon in the top left of Prism. The PAD file must be in focus for this action to be enabled. The star next to My.pad should disappear.
• Close the PAD View
• In the Project Explorer, double click on Data_Decomp/My.pad. The PAD view will appear.
• Select the Load Pit tab at the top of the view and click the Open Pit button.

The view will now switch to show the histograms ready to begin the analysis session.

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