Apple CHUD Tools 4.4.3 review

The Computer Hardware Understanding Developer Tools (CHUD Tools) are designed to help hardware and software developers measure and optimize the performance of PowerPC Macintosh systems running their products under Mac OS X.

License: Freeware OS: Mac OS X File size: 32477K Developer: Apple Price: $0.00 Updated: 27 Sep 2006

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The Computer Hardware Understanding Developer Tools (CHUD Tools) are designed to help hardware and software developers measure and optimize the performance of PowerPC Macintosh systems running their products under Mac OS X. All of the CHUD tools fully support the latest in Macintosh hardware (G5) and software (Mac OS X 10.3, Panther).

Here are some key features of "Apple CHUD Tools":
Shark - source line level profiling tool which shows you where time is being spent (both user and supervisor code), and correlates performance events to your program's code
MONster - provides direct access to performance counters and presents the data in both spreadsheet and chart form
Reggie SE - allows you to view the contents of PowerPC special purpose registers as well as PCI configuration registers
Saturn - exact, function-level profiler with which you can generate and view a complete function call trace of your application
BigTop - graphing front-end to top and vm_stat useful for monitoring system performance
PMC Index - search tool for finding performance counter events and their setup
CacheBasher - measures memory hierarchy performance under a wide range of conditions
Skidmarks GT - processor benchmark which measures integer, floating-point and vector performance
Spindown HD - monitors the power state of drives connected to the system
CPU.pref - enable/disable second processor on dual processor machine on the fly
acid - analyzes instruction traces and presents detailed analysis and histogram reports
amber - captures the instruction and data address stream generated by a processes running in MacOS X, and saves it to disk in TT6, TT6E or FULL format.
chudRemoteCtrl - command line tool for remotely starting MONster or Shark.
monster - scriptable command line version of MONster
shark - scriptable command line version of Shark
simg4 - PPC7400 simulator
CHUD.framework - programmatic access to many of the features of the CHUD tools.

What's New:
Version 4.3.2 fixes a variety of bugs and adds support for new hardware. The CHUD package installer no longer depends on the Xcode Developer Tools package being installed.

Shark
Added ability to symbolicate profiles of release (stripped) binaries.
Improved support for Intel performance counters
Improved code analysis
Fixed support for per-counter trigger intervals
Fixed loading of sample/Sampler output files
Fixed to allow static analysis of .o files
Fixed network profiling to automatically select a port
Fixed network profiling to wait for controlling Shark to start profiling
Fixed parsing of user-supplied System Trace codes

Reggie
Added support for PCI devices and physical memory on Intel machines.
Added support for PCIe and PCI capability registers

BigTop
Improved connection management
Fixed several memory leaks.

Requirements:
Developer Transition Kit (DTK) systems are no longer supported.