8. Compiler and Tools
SystemTap is a tracing and probing tool that allows users to study and monitor the activities of the operating system (particularly, the kernel) in fine detail. It provides information similar to the output of tools like netstat, ps, top, and iostat; however, SystemTap is designed to provide more filtering and analysis options for collected information.
- Alpha version of remote host scripting with --remote USER@HOST
- Optimization of near zero cost for dormant user probe points
The GNU Project Debugger (normally referred to as GDB) debugs programs written in C, C++, and other languages by executing them in a controlled fashion, and then printing out their data. GDB in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1 is updated to version 7.2, providing many bugfixes and enhancements, including enhancements to the python scripting features, and C++ debugging enhancements.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1 introduces the Performance Application Programming Interface (PAPI). PAPI is a specification of a cross-platform interfaces to hardware performance counters on modern microprocessors. These counters exist as a small set of registers that count events, which are occurrences of specific signals related to a processor's function. Monitoring these events has a variety of uses in application performance analysis and tuning.
OProfile is a system-wide profiler for Linux systems. The profiling runs transparently in the background and profile data can be collected at any time. In Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1, OProfile is updated to version 0.9.6-12, providing support for AMD family 12h/14h/15h processors and Intel Westmere specific events.
Valgrind is an instrumentation framework for building dynamic analysis tools that can be used to profile applications in detail. Valgrind tools are generally used to automatically detect many memory management and threading problems. The Valgrind suite also includes tools that allow you to build new profiling tools to suit your needs.
The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) includes, among others, C, C++, and Java GNU compilers and related support libraries. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 features version 4.4 of GCC, which includes the following features and enhancements:
- IBM z196 new instruction support and optimizations
- IBM z10 prefetch instruction support and optimizations
The libdfp library is updated in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1. libdfp is a decimal floating point math library, and is available as an alternative to the glibc math functions on Power and s390x architectures, and is available in the supplementary channels.
Eclipse is a powerful development environment that provides tools for each phase of the development process. It is integrated into a single, fully configurable user interface for ease of use, featuring a pluggable architecture which allows for extension in a variety of ways.
- All the major plugins are refreshed, including Valgrind and OProfile integration and the tools for working with C and C++
- The Mylyn task-focused framework is updated
- Enhanced resource filtering for workspace contents
- performance enhancements when working with C, C++ and Java code bases
New IcedTea Web Open Source Web Browser Plugin and Webstart implementation for OpenJDK.
- Allows browsers such as Firefox to load Java applets embedded in a web page
- Provides framework to launch JNLP (Java Network Launching Protocol) files
