Streamline in DS-5 5.23 Release - Templates, Standalone application and more

We have just released DS-5 5.23 with significant enhancements to Streamline. In this blog, I will highlight the major changes in the latest version.  For a more detailed list of enhancements and fixes, please see the changelog.

Templates

In 5.23, we have added a new feature called templates. With templates, you can now create custom configuration of charts, save it on the disk as a template, and apply that configuration on any existing capture.This is best explained with an example. Here, I have created a Streamline capture with support for 3 charts - CPU Activity (User Activity and System Activity Counter), Clock (Frequency Counter) and Scheduler (Switch Counter). When I apply my custom templates, CPU_And_Clock (Only CPU Activity and Clock charts) and Only_CPU (CPU Activity only), the view changes according to the template.

Pre-configured Templates

Modern SoCs support complex performance counters that are not always easy to understand and use. To make it easy for Mali GPU users, we have included some pre-configured templates in 5.23 Streamline.  These templates include charts with information that is easy to understand. One such chart is Mali External Bandwidth, which plots more understandable number of external bus read bytes rather than underlying $MaliL2CacheExtReadsExternalReadBeats counter.

All the pre-configured templates included in the release can be seen in the below image.

Versatile Templates

Templates can be used in other useful ways.

• Capture only the required counters. This is useful in debugging an issue that is isolated to one part of the system. For example, using a GPU template while debugging GPU performance, reduces overhead of capturing CPU counters.
• Combine charts of two templates to see a joined up view. This is useful when debugging an issue that spans across multiple parts of the system. For example, for a problem that involves CPU and GPU, you can combine CPU and GPU specific templates to see the overall picture.
• Create a template from one capture and use it on another. This is useful when analyzing multiple captures for a same problem. For example, if you are analyzing cache performance across different use-cases, you can create an cache-analysis template once, and use the same to analyze the captures for different use-cases.
• Share the templates with others.  Templates can be a great mechanism to share knowledge. For example, an expert who understands the underlying counters, can create a template and share it with others, thus allowing non-experts to quickly get started.

Standalone application

Streamline is now a standalone application, independent of Eclipse for DS-5, making it easy to launch from the Start menu.  Note that you can continue to launch from within DS-5 using Show Views menu item.

Faster UI response

In 5.23, we have significantly improved UI response leading to faster zoom, quicker scroll among others. We undertook a major overhaul of the Streamline code allowing us to make it simpler and more responsive.

Conclusion

DS-5 v5.23 comes with an enhanced Streamline with new features like templates and an improved UI response. Streamline is now a standalone application and can be launched independent of DS-5. You can download the DS-5 5.23 version and explore the new features.