What do you do when you are ready to get started working with Intel Active Management Technology and you are excited about the recent inclusion of a software based (AMT) KVM feature and you can’t get it to work? A while back I wrote a blog –> HERE SCSDiscovery.exe /Output file test.xml SystemDiscovery /NoRegistry test.xml will be a debug file – look for another file named as follows: FQDN.domainname. 2. Is Intel AMT Enabled? Open the xml file from running the Discovery tool an look for the following lines: 7.1.4 7.0.0.1144 7.1.4.1068 true You want to make sure the system’s version of Intel AMT supports KVM and it has a valid MEI (HECI) Driver/Firmware and that Intel AMT has been enabled/configured. (Check! Check/Check! Check!) All version numbers should match up for the major number (7 here.) If your system is passing all the tests so far, you can move down to the next step of verifying that KVM is enabled and supported. 3. Is your system KVM capable? Take another look at that XML file. Look for the following entries: true true (IDER must be enabled ) false true false (Not a reliable indicator!!) True if the KVM redirection interface is supported in the Intel AMT Firmware. IDE-Redirection must be enabled in the bios in order to use the KVM feature using the Redirection ports. True if the Keyboard Video Mouse (KVM) redirection interface is enabled in Intel AMT (This refers to the listener and if you have enabled Intel AMT but have not yet configured your KVM connections, this will show up as false .) True if KVM redirection is enabled in the MEBx of the Intel AMT device True if the BIOS of the platform supports KVM redirection. This entry is not always reported correctly – as you can see on my system it indicates false . But my system is KVM capable. It is important to note that the Discovery tool may indicate that your system can do KVM even if you do not have the right graphics card – that’s why you check for that first. 4. Configuration Follow the guides in the SDK documentation . Search for the following topic: (Setting Up the Integrated Viewer Application) Note that you need to configure the listener/ports/password. Port 5900 is the IANA port reserved for Virtual Network Computing (VNC). By enabling port 5900, all traffic to this port is routed to Intel AMT for KVM processing. The RFB protocol requires a password, so the first time an application enables port 5900, it should also set the RFB password (which must be 8 characters exactly.) KVM can also use the Redirection Port. If, after all of this, you are still having problems, post your question on our forum .
Posts Tagged ‘Tool’
Communication error between application and Intel® ME module (FW Update Client)
Have you experienced this error message, or one like it? Then this blog is for you because you could be experiencing an issue with your MEI Driver. This write-up contains information on how to go about determining if your vPro software is dishing out error messages due to not having a valid MEI Driver installed. Note: All OEM reference information in this document is subject to change without notice. Please contact OEMs regarding any requests for reference information updates. First let us cover what are the key Intel Technologies that utilize the MEI Driver: Intel® Active Management Technology (AMT) Intel® Anti-Theft (AT) Technology Symptoms of an invalid or Missing Driver: For Intel® AMT, the MEI driver is needed for the following functionality: Discovery (The SCS Discovery tool, for example, runs on the local client) Host Based Provisioning (Intel AMT makes local calls to the Manageability Engine (ME) and thus the driver needs to be present) Agent Presence Feature (local calls to the ME are required to set up Watchdog timers) 3PDS Storage feature (local client usage only) – MEI driver is not used when making the remote API calls. For Intel® AT, the MEI driver is needed for the following functionality: Enrollment Rendezvous with the Server Unenrollment To sum it up, the MEI driver is needed whenever the Manageability Engine is accessed from software running on the local client. The first symptom you would run into is an error message of sorts - it may resemble the following: Error 9450: Communication error between application and Intel® ME module (FW Update Client) Error 9459: Internal error (Could not determine FW features information) Unable to initialize CLS: Error (259): Cannot locate device interface info for HECI: No more data is available. Error: Error state returned when testing Intel® AT. Please verify Intel® Management Engine Interface driver is installed and system supports Intel® AT capability. Getting to the root of the issue: First, you should make sure that the Manageability Engine is enabled in the BIOS – if it is not, then enable it. If you are experiencing errors with Intel® AT, also make sure Intel® AT is enabled in the BIOS. The same goes for Intel® AMT – make sure the ME and Intel AMT are both enabled in the BIOS. Be aware that the OEMs have differing ways to enable features in their BIOS’s and you will experience variances here. If your problem was simply not enabling the ME / Intel AT/ Intel AMT then you may need to go download some tools. Here are my recommendations: (1 Star) If you are running Intel® Anti-Theft, download the Anti-Theft Status tool . This tool reports whether or not the system is capable of running Intel® Anti-theft and whether or not there is a valid MEI driver. It does NOT output the version of the MEI driver, if installed. This tool is really only useful if you want to know if there is a valid MEI driver on the system and if the system supports Intel® Anti-Theft. (4 Stars) If you want to do an actual “Discovery” of the system, you want to go download the SCS Discovery Tool . This tool is often pushed down to systems by Manageability Consoles in order to do a system “Scan.” It reports the following: MEI Driver/version, LMS and UNS versions, ME enabled, a host of information needed for implementing Intel AMT, Intel Anti-Theft status, network configurations and more. It can write everything to the system’s registry or to an XML output file. (4 Stars) The Intel Manageability and Security Status tool is also handy to have installed. It normally comes bundled with the Intel AMT drivers from the various OEM websites (note that the Intel AMT drivers are the same for Intel Anti-theft .) Although this tool is great to have, it is not necessary. (3 Stars) Another thing (actually, the first thing) to look at is the Device Manager, if the system is running a Windows OS. No need to download, it is already on your system. The above tools offer a variety of ways to find out information about your system and the MEI driver status. Get them all and play with them. I would say that for just the question of whether or not the system has a valid MEI driver, all you need is your Device Manager. If you need or want to know more, like for determining the status of Intel AT or Intel AMT in finer detail you should use the SCS Discovery tool. Let’s look at the tools individually and see what they have to offer. I have included screen shots here of the information you can get from each of the tools. While there is definitely a lot of overlap, you can see that they all give you the basic information that you need. Intel Anti-Theft Status Tool – note that this tool does not give you deeper information about how Intel AT is configured on your system – if Intel AT is configured on your system then it had a valid MEI driver at one point. The output below shows what the tool tells us if there is not an MEI driver installed as well as what it displays when there is a valid MEI Driver. SCS Discovery Tool -output is either written to the registers, or to an XML file. Below is a very small snippet showing basic information that is important for Intel AMT and Intel AT support. Intel Management and Security Status Tool – you can quickly find out if Intel AMT and/or Intel AT is enabled in the Bios, what are the versions of the FW and of the associated components. Go to “Programs–> Intel–> IMSS” Windows Device Manager – Invalid MEI Driver – look under System Devices. If it is present, find out if it is valid or not by looking at the properties. If it shows that there is a driver, but the major version number doesn’t match the major version number of the FW or it actually has no files associated with it, it is an invalid or a dummy* driver. *Microsoft was pushing out a dummy driver in order to get rid of the yellow bang that would be present when a valid MEI driver was not installed for whatever reason. The good news is that for both 2010 and 2011 platforms Microsoft is now pushing out a valid MEI driver. While this is better than the dummy driver, we recommend to always go out to the OEM site to get up-to-date MEI drivers for your vPro platform. Windows Device Manager – Valid MEI Driver. Look for the version number and it should have the same major version number as the FW version. You have used the tools and now you know that you need a valid driver. Where do you get the MEI driver package if it is not installed on your system? As stated above, it is always best to get the right driver package from your OEM’s support site. There are multiple technologies that depend on the Intel ME, and OEM’s will often have a single MEI driver package that covers multiple technologies. Typically a package also covers multiple models. Each OEM has their own page structure and their own way of finding the driver package. Lenovo: Default support: http://support.lenovo.com/en_US/downloads/default.page? Three mechanisms for finding the appropriate driver package, Quick Path allows for putting in just model (E420, T420, for example), and is probably the most straightforward to use. The MEI bundle is under the Advanced System Management category, normally this category also contains a readme describing which systems the bundle applies to. A typical package name is Intel Management Engine Interface. HP: Default support: http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/ProductRoot.jsp The “Search Products” field is on right side of page, the model (Elitebook 8560w, Envy 14 Beats, ProBook 6560b) is sufficient to find the appropriate package. It is necessary to select “Drivers and Software”, and then the OS type before picking a driver package. HP puts MEI package in the “Driver – Chipset” category. A typical package name is Intel Management Engine Components Driver. Dell: Default support page: http://support.dell.com/support/ A pop-up dialog box will come up with options, “Choose a Model” is straightforward. It’s necessary to select “Product Family” (example: Laptop), then “Product Line” (example: Precision Laptop), then “Product Model” (example: M6600), then confirm your selection. On Dell’s site, the MEI driver package is located under the “Chipset” category, a common name is Intel AMT HECI or AMT 7 Management Interface driver. Specific Driver Packages (2010 Platforms; Intel AT 2.0/Intel AMT 6.0) Lenovo: MEI Driver package http://support.lenovo.com/en_US/downloads/detail.page?LegacyDocID=MIGR-74374 Applies to: T410, T410i, T410s, T410si, T510, T510i, W510, W701, W701ds, X201 , X201i, X201s, X201, Tablet HP: MEI driver package http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareDescription.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&prodTypeId=321957&prodSeriesId=4096175&swItem=ob-83267-1&prodNameId=4097219&swEnvOID=4061&swLang=13&taskId=135&mode=4&idx=3 Applies to: HP EliteBook 2540p, HP EliteBook 2740p, HP EliteBook 8440p, HP EliteBook 8440w, HP EliteBook 8540p, HP EliteBook 8540w, HP EliteBook 8740w, HP ProBook 6450b, HP ProBook 6550b Dell : MEI driver package http://support.dell.com/support/downloads/download.aspx?c=us&cs=555&l=en&s=biz&releaseid=R304259&SystemID=LAT_E6410&servicetag=&os=W764&osl=en&deviceid=12177&devlib=0&typecnt=0&vercnt=5&catid=-1&impid=-1&formatcnt=0&libid=27&fileid=458370 Applies to: Latitude E4310, Latitude E6410, Latitude E6410 ATG, Latitude E6510, OptiPlex 980
How safe is your Fortran application?
Intel® Inspector XE is often recommended as a great tool for verifying the correctness and security of C++ applications, but it is important to note that this tool works just as well on Fortran and C# programs. If you develop in one of these languages, Intel Inspector XE can be a very valuable tool in your arsenal to help improve software correctness. Intel Inspector XE performs two main types of analysis: Threading analysis detects issues like deadlocks and data races in parallel applications Memory analysis detects various memory issues like mismatched allocations/deallocations and memory leaks Additionally, Intel Inspector XE helps visualize, report, and filter Static Analysis results generated by Intel® Composer XE (requires Intel® Parallel Studio XE, Intel® Fortran Studio XE, or Intel® Cluster Studio XE suite license) which can detect over 250 issues through static code analysis. Recently I’ve been focusing some time on creating introductory information for Fortran developers on how to use Intel Inspector XE. I have created three articles describing how to use the different Intel Inspector XE analyses on a Fortran application. I also presented a live webinar which is now available for download along with the accompanying slides. The links for all of these are included below. If you are a Fortran developer and you want confidence in your application’s correctness and security, I recommend taking a look at Intel Inspector XE. Articles: Using Intel® Inspector XE on Fortran Applications – Memory Analysis Using Intel® Inspector XE on Fortran Applications – Threading Analysis Using Intel® Inspector XE on Fortran Applications – Static Security Analysis Webinar and slides: http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-software-development-products-technical-presentations/ Under the heading “Using Intel(R) Inspector XE with Fortran Applications” Download a full-featured 30 day evaluation copy of Intel Inspector XE or Intel Parallel Studio XE from the evaluation center .
Myths about static analysis. The first myth – a static analyzer is a single-use product
While communicating with people on forums, I noticed there are a few lasting misconceptions concerning the static analysis methodology. I decided to write a series of brief articles where I want to show you the real state of things. The first myth is: “A static analyzer is a single-use product”. This is how this statement looks in discussions on forums (this is a collective image): When you have a trial/cracked version, you can run it for free on all your projects to find several old errors and feel satisfied for some time. Everyone’s happy. People have used the tool, and the developers don’t know they were cheated and robbed. In this case, a programmer cheats himself/herself, not the tool’s developers. The programmer just got a seeming profit from the work done, but not the real profit. I cannot manage to bring this idea home to programmers but I will continue trying. There is no use of launching a static analyzer occasionally. Here is an analogy: We set the /W0 warning level in compiler and start to develop a project. We curse, fix silly mistakes and misprints and test our code more and longer. Then we occasionally turn on the /W3 switch and fight the warnings and then again set /W0. All those errors the compiler could tell us about at the /W3 level, we were bravely and long searching for in the debugger, having spent 10-100 times more time on that. Besides, note that now the programmer does not like the results given at the /W3 level, for he/she has fixed almost all the errors through testing and debugging. The compiler generates mostly false reports at the /W3 level. Now let’s go back to static analysis. The situation is absolutely the same: an analyzer produces a lot of false reports, being launched on rare occasions. There are few real errors because they have been already found through other methods. Like the /W3 switch, static analysis brings maximum profit when being used regularly. By the way, static analysis is kind of an extension of compiler-generated warnings. Many diagnostic rules that were once implemented in old analyzers gradually pass to compilers. Of course, analyzers will always be ahead of compilers regarding the diagnostic capabilities; they are developed for this very purpose. The compiler has a lot of other tasks; moreover, it is imposed stricter performance requirements. Some people give the following answer in the heat of discussion: The idea is true for novice students. But it’s not so much important for expert programmers. If I set the /W0 switch, I won’t write worse code. You should improve your programming style instead of getting more crutches. I absolutely agree with the idea above. But let’s play a bit and alter this text in the following way: The idea is true for novice drivers. But it’s not so much important for expert drivers. If I don’t buckle up at the wheel, I won’t drive worse. You should improve your driving style instead of getting more safety components. Again, you can’t argue against that. However, any adequately thinking driver understands that one still should buckle up when driving a car. The same is with static code analysis. Even a skilled programmer is not secure from mistakes and misprints. Examples given in this article confirm my idea very well. Certainly, all the professional programmers are sure that they never make such silly mistakes, but we’ll speak on this point in the next post about myths.
OpenMDTK – Improved Host Based Provisioning
Just a few days ago I released the first version of the Open Manageability Toolkit (OpenMDTK) with Intel AMT Host Based Provisioning support. Well, I just made a bunch of fixes and released a new version with improved support. For one, the user interface responds better, but the most important new feature in this release is that you can now un-provision Intel AMT back out of client mode. So now, you can provision and un-provision at will (well, almost, I hear Intel AMT has a limit within a certain time-span). This first picture below shows the yellow indicator then client provisioning is an option and, when you click “setup” the wizard that is used to ask for and confirm the password. Very simple stuff. The second picture below show the “Intel ME Information” form. You can access this form from the help menu in Commander, or File menu in Outpost. It gives you the status of the management engine. If it’s in client mode, there is an new “un-provision” button that shows up at the bottom of that form. Just click and you are done. just remember that, both setup and un-provision in client more are available only if you run the tool in “administrator” mode. So, you can do “Run as administrator…” in Windows, if you removed the user security prompting. Ether way, it will make these options available on Intel AMT 6.1 or higher. As always, feedback appreciated. Ylian opentools.homeip.net
It’s here! The Intel Guide for Developing Multithreaded Applications
The author with a printed edition of the Intel Guide For Developing Multithreaded Applications Okay, so it’s not something that I would promote as “New & Improved” with big splashy TV commercials, like some laundry detergent or kids’ sugary drink. I would be more likely to skip the trumpets and play a fanfare on a kazoo instead. Even so, I’m excited to announce that the Intel Guide for Developing Multithreaded Applications has been updated. Many of the articles featured in the Guide remain as relevant to parallel programmers today as they did when the Guide was first put together. Good parallel progarmming practice will always be good parallel programming practice. Even so, technology tools are changing at a steady pace, and we know that the Guide needs to keep up with those changes. To that end we’ve added three new articles and revised two others. The revised articles illustrate some new features of Intel software tools. The article ” Getting Code Ready for Parallel Execution with Intel® Parallel Composer ” has added explanations of new features and new programming libraries supported by the Intel® Parallel Composer compiler. ” Using Intel® Inspector XE 2011 to Find Data Races in Multithreaded Code ” updates how to use the latest version of the thread debugging tool. One of the new articles also deals with Intel software tools. ” Optimize Data Structures and Memory Access Patterns to Improve Data Locality ” poses a tricky parallel performance issue. Intel® VTune™ Amplifier XE is used to not only detect the problem, but the tool gives users some low-level analysis option to diagnose the root-cause of the problem. The article illustrates a methodology to delve deeper into parallel code to identify and correct bottlenecks to scalability and performance. Vector computation has been a staple of parallelism for many decades. The second new article, ” Using AVX Without Writing AVX Code ” shows how programmers can take advantage of the new vector hardware units and AVX instructions without needing to go down to the assembly language level of coding. For viewers of Parallel Programming Talk this might sound familiar. Our guest for show #114 was Richard Hubbard who talked about this exact topic. We felt it was something parallel programmers would want to know about, so Richard and Eric Palmer (Intel) wrote it up for the Guide. The topic of the third new article, ” Optimizing Applications for NUMA ” was also featured on Parallel Programming Talk. David Ott appeared in show #113 to tell us about NUMA architecture and how best to program for NUMA. If you have never heard of NUMA or if you have, but have been unsure about what you need to be doing to get the best performance from your applications, then David’s article is an excellent place to start. Even if you’ve read articles from the Guide before this, you might find something you can apply to your own work in the new articles. This isn’t the last revision we’ll make to the Guide, of course. I’ve got some ideas for topics that I’m sure will find their way into the collection. Future articles may be inserted without much hoopla, so check back periodically to see if we’ve added something new. If you have a topic that you think should be featured in the Guide, let me know. We are always interested in delivering what readers and parallel programming practitioners want to know more about.
AMD Driver Autodetect
AMD Driver Autodetect detects your graphics card and operating system and tells you if a new driver is available. If there is a new driver, the tool will download it with a click of a button and start the installation process. This software need Internet connect, no installation, can run directly.
Genevieve Bell – It’s time to open the conversation between Computer Science and other disciplines.
Dr. Genevieve Bell, Director of the Interaction and Experience Research Group, Intel Corporation. One of the strengths of Intel is that it hires some of the most incredibly smart and interesting people in the world. One of the best part of my job is that I get to talk with them on my Teach Parallel show. My recent guest, Dr. Genevieve Bell, certainly fits both smart– Stanford PhD, Intel Fellow etc. and interesting– a senior level cultural anthropologist in a company full of CS and Engineering PhDs. She is also an engaging and funny person. Genevieve joined Intel in 1998, just when computers were really starting to leave the office and become part of everyday life. As has been true with any important technology, the tool changes the user at least as much as the user changes the tool. Genevieve’s insights into how folks in differing cultures & locations lived with technology, the stories she collected, were critical in helping Intel understand, adapt to and plan for this new world. Genevieve talks about her meeting with Computer Scientists around the world. She offers a challenge to professors and department heads, “It is absolutely a call for Computer Scientists to think about who is in dialogue with your department.” She feels that we need to expand co-teaching across departments as well as across disciplines. Hear more in her interview above. Find out more about Genevieve by reading her blogs here . Find past Teach Parallel interviews, as well as news of upcoming shows, on the Teach Parallel page on the Intel Software Network. This interview was recorded August 30, 2011
WinMusik
WinMusik is a platform-independent software for managing music on audio CDs, DVDs, Music cassettes, records, MP3 discs and other recordings. It consists essentially an input screen for the title and a search function. Organize various type of data with this tool. WinMusik is a useful and…
How we have Solved an Engineering task for Several Years in PVS-Studio
At first I wanted to title this post “How PVS-Studio enables cheap integration of static code analysis into the development process” but I decided not to do it because of the ambiguous interpretation of the word “cheap”. So I will tell you about one engineering problem we had to solve constantly to enable people to use our product. Going a bit ahead I want so say that we seem to have solved it. So, having developed the first full version of our static code analyzer (that was called Viva64 at the time and served to detect 64-bit errors) back in 2007, we faced an issue of tool’s integration by our users. Our clients are companies that have at least several tens of developers and at least several hundred thousand code lines. Any static analyzer will generate plenty of warnings on a code of that size. For instance, our tool generated up to several thousand messages on one project. Yes, of course, the trouble here is with false reports of analyzers. But any analyzer has false reports and you can’t help it. A question rose what users were to do with a lot of messages they got? That is, the problem looked as follows: a potential user downloads a program (trial-version), launches it and gets ten thousand messages. It certainly makes him sad, he uninstalls the program – and one more client is lost for us. The first thing we did is removing double messages at once. The analyzer checks C/C++ projects and sometimes it happens that an error in an .h-file is reported during the check of several .cpp-files that use it. We don’t have this doubling. Then we added capabilities of analysis result filtering (and then we constantly improved them): filtering by error code, by message text, a capability not to check files by masks and so on. All this allowed us to significantly reduce the number of messages but only after customization. At the first use, a person would get a pile of messages all the same. So, message filtering is an important tool but it did not solve the initial problem – difficulty of integrating the tool into the development process. Then the analyzer acquired the new mechanism “Mark as False Alarm”. Its principle is adding comments of a special kind (//-V112) into the code to suppress the analyzer-generated messages. Having marked the code in such a way, in future you will get error-reports only for those code fragments that do not have this marking. Ideally it will be only newly added code. Although the problem of integrating the analyzer into the team development process became a bit simpler, still it required that several members of the team marked the code first to remove rubbish messages. The next step towards solution of the integration problem was the capability to check only files modified during the last several days. It was much closer to the idea of starting to get profit from static analysis at once. But the problem remained. A user doesn’t know about this feature and if we enable it by default it won’t be clear why so few files are checked. But I repeat this again – the direction seemed right to us. So we went on and made a new super feature “Incremental Analysis after Build”. The analyzer now launches right after the compilation and checks only those files which have been affected by user editing. Unlike checking files for the last several days (when editing of the developer team was could be checked), the user now sees errors ONLY in the code he directly handles. Programmers now won’t worry about large sizes of code they do not deal with. Perhaps this code is older than 5 years; it virtually doesn’t endure any modifications and most defects in it have been fixed. You don’t need to rush and check this code first of all, and the analyzer doesn’t. The programmer will see warnings only in the fresh code. And if he has some time left, he may check the project in full and peep into the most rarely visited places. Yes, the analyzer still produces false reports. Yes, filters haven’t become less important. But there is another thing that counts. We have managed to reduce the cost of INTEGRATION (costs of people’s efforts on startup) of the static analyzer to zero. That is, a person now downloads the static analyzer, installs it and IMMEDIATELY starts getting profit from it without any additional efforts. But there remained one last thing to complete the task. All was good, but it was difficult to notice it when the analyzer found errors. Color change of the PVS-Studio window’s icon (as we made it in the beginning) is not so visible while in Visual Studio 2005 it doesn’t work at all. The solution was to make a pop-up message. Surely, we all don’t like all those importunate pop-up notes. But in this case it will be useful to programmers for sure and it will appear rarely on condition that they do not make a lot of errors in code. So, the engineering task of integrating static analysis into the development process has been solved. That is why the Incremental Analysis after Build mode will be enabled by default in Incremental Analysis after Build. The conclusion is simple. Now developers should not get afraid of difficulties of static code analysis integration because they can simply download PVS-Studio, install it and study errors that will be detected in newly developed code.



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