Viavi Xgig, User Manual

Page: 409 / 468

Converting Bus Doctor Files Chapter 18, Converting Files from Other Platforms
Xgig Analyzer User’s Guide 395
3
Navigate to the directory where the trace is stored.
NOTE: This will vary somewhat for Bus Doctor and Bus Doctor Plus. Bus Doctor files are
typically a single
.trace file. Bus Doctor Plus files are comprised of several files stored within
a directory, which contains the file _data.trace along with some other supporting files.
4
Double-click the .trace file which you want to convert.
5 If the trace has been previously converted, you will be prompted to overwrite the trace or abort
the conversion.
6 The trace will then be converted to Xgig trace format. A screen displays showing the progress
of the conversion. Once conversion is complete, the trace automatically opens in the Xgig
application.
Opening traces
Once the trace file has been converted, the files can be reopened by simply opening the .TGP file
in the same directory where the original trace file was. In the example above, this would be
C:\traces\ReadWrite.trc\ReadWrite.tgp . This file can be opened with Xgig Expert via the
File>Open
menu or in Xgig TraceView by simply double-clicking on the TGP file in explorer or
using File>Open .
Converter notes
SAS Scrambled Idle Dwords and SATA/STP Scrambled Primitive Data will be discarded upon
conversion. Only primitives with valid K-characters are converted (with the exception of errors).
To greatly speed up conversion and analysis time by Expert, the converter, by default, does not
convert SATA_HOLD, SATA_HOLDA, SATA_R_IP, SATA_CONT, or SATA_SYNC primitives.
These primitives are not typically utilized by Expert, other than for a couple of very subtle
performance metrics and the trade-off is MUCH faster trace conversion and processing time by
Expert and TraceView. If you find it important to see these primitives in the converted trace, utilize
the converter from the command line (see below) with the /I switch to re-enable the conversion of
these.
The converter also, by default, truncates the frames down to 16 words per frame. The extra data is
not utilized by Expert for the most part, and requires significant amounts of overhead/time to
process, thus is dropped in the conversion process. If you find it important to see all of the frame
data in the converted trace, utilize the converter from the command line (see below) with the /T0
switch to re-enable the full frame conversion without truncation.
TraceView will show COMSAS, COMINIT, COMWAKE, COMRESET and D.C. Idle events as
“simulated events” with meaningless 8b data values. These items will be visible and decoded.
However, they will be represented as K-character events.
For Bus Doctor traces, the clock rate information from the trace is not converted (because of some
limitations in the original capture). SAS traces are assumed to be 3.0Gbps unless converted from
the command line conversion utility with the /R30 switch to select 1.5Gbps.