Question

So, I’ve got some stuff that I need to develop with pintools, and I’m having a hard time using eclipse with it all.

I found this, but it doesn’t give very specific details. I was hoping that someone could provide very specific instructions as to how to use eclipse on Mac (or linux) to develop pintools.

I tried it a little, and found that on mac you have to install the clang build toolchain, and even then, doing a simple import of the MyPinTool was harder than it seemed because the makefile specifies a lot of extra options/variables that I don’t know how best or correctly to configure in eclipse.

You can download pintools. The makefile that I’m talking about is in source/tools/MyPinTool, it sources a file located at tools/makefile.gnu.config

EDIT: by the way, I’m on Mac OS X Lion with an i7 using pin 2.12

c++ --version returns this:

Apple clang version 4.1 (tags/Apple/clang-421.11.66) (based on LLVM
3.1svn) Target: x86_64-apple-darwin11.4.2 Thread model: posix

Answer 1

I’ll guess that you are using the newest version of Eclipse (4.2) and that you start working from the template MyPinTool pintool in “source/tools”. I’ll take those guesses because it is much easier to configure CDT to recognize the pin environment from a compiling tool, rather than manual configuring it.

First create a makefile project from existing source:

Then go to your project properties and select under “C/C++ General” -> “Preprocessor Include…” the “CDT GCC build output parser”, make sure that it is enabled and if you are using clang++ as the compiler, that you add it in the compiler pattern:

Now build your pintool from within eclipse (either click on the hammer icon in the toolbar, or right click your projet and select “Build Project”). CDT should parse the build output and resolve all the paths and required macros from it. Basically, now you are good to go… But…

I have found that CDT has some quirks, if this doesn’t work, try and do the following:

1. Check if you are working on a “deep” path (/a/b/c/d/e/f/g/h/i/j/k/l/m), sometimes CDT takes the relative build path used by the make file, and translates it to a wrong absolute path. I’ve found that working in a “shallower” path resolves this issue (I should open a bug report for this…).
2. Sometimes the indexer doesn’t kick in right away. Try refreshing the project, rebuilding the index (Right click on project then “Index” -> “Rebuild”), and even restarting eclipse then doing this again.

I know it is a bit of voodoo magic, but I got it working 🙂

I tested this procedure on a fresh kit with MyPinTool but if it still doesn’t work, please provide the steps you did and what errors does eclipse give you.