Welcome
What's New
View new features for FlowTracer 2025.1.0.
FlowTracer Overview
An advanced mission critical dependency management platform for developing and executing flows.
FlowTracer Tutorials
Discover FlowTracer functionality with interactive tutorials.
Altair FlowTracer User Guide
FlowTracer is a complete system to create, manage, and execute design flows.
Altair FlowTracer Administrator Guide
This manual is aimed at the person who will be the administrator for FlowTracer. This person will be responsible for configuring the network resources, setting up the licensing, and establishing security and access rules for the system.
Altair FlowTracer Developer Guide
- FlowTracer Roles
  When using FlowTracer in large deployments, three main roles emerge: Administrator, Developer and User. In smaller organizations, a given person may have multiple roles, but the duties of each role still exist.
- Environment Management
  To ensure the correct and repeatable behavior of the tools, the environment must be controlled. This chapter explains how VOV supports multiple reusable environments.
- Execute Jobs From the Command Line
- Flowbuilding
  The trace is built using a combination of techniques.
- Flow Description Language (FDL)
- Tool Integration
  - Wrappers
  - Track the Origins of Dependencies
  - Integration by Interception
  - Library-based Interception
  - Integration by Instrumentation
  - VOV Instrumentation Library (VIL)
  - Instrumentation Procedure
  - VILtools
  - Integration by Encapsulation
  - Encapsulation Procedures
    In an encapsulation script, you can use the following Tcl procedures:
  - Capsule Post-Processing
  - Capsule On-the-Fly
  - Capsules for VHDL and Verilog Tools
- Integrate Difficult Tools
- Runtime Change Propagation Control
  The patented technique of Runtime Change Propagation Control (RCPC) provides the ability to stop the propagation of insignificant changes through the flow.
- Flow Library
  FlowTracer captures your design in design flows described by Flow.tcl files. The Flow Library is meant to help users locate and deploy instances of packaged flows bound to their specific design data.
- Files, Equivalences, Exclusions
  The files used in a project reside in one or more directories spread all around your filesystems. Each logical name defined in the equiv.tcl file implicitly declares the root of a workspace. You can browse the workspaces using the browser interface.
- Makefile Conversion
- Advanced Tasker Topics
- Resource Management
  The Resource Map Set represents the collection of resource maps that have been assigned to a project and the constraints associated with such resources.
- CGI Interface
- Events
  Every change in the trace is recorded as an event, which is then sent to all clients that subscribe to them.
- Miscellaneous

View All Altair Accelerator Help

Wrappers

The choice of the wrapper depends on the integration method used for each of the tools. These methods are three: encapsulation, instrumentation, interception. The following table summarizes the ways to invoke the wrappers:


Technique	Wrapper	Description
Interception	vrt	Use this to also activate interception of the operating system calls. The wrapper also honors encapsulation and instrumentation. The interception is available only on Linux.
Instrumentation	vov	Use this wrapper for tools that have been instrumented. The wrapper also honors encapsulation, if available.
Encapsulation	vw	Use this wrapper for tools that have been encapsulated. If no capsule is available, then the only input is the "executable" and the only output is the stdout and stderr, or any redirection thereof. This wrapper is also used in Accelerator for batch jobs.

The binaries vovbuild, clevercopy, and cleverrename don't need to be run with a wrapper usually as they are fully instrumented. In the rare case of slow NFS servers, a vov wrapper may be needed.

Note: There is only one actual binary which all wrappers invoke to activate runtime tracing, and it is called vw2. Through symbolic links (on UNIX) or copies, the binary can be called with several different names. The behavior of the wrapper is controlled either by the name used to invoke the binary or by the command line options -C, -V, -R and -T.