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Linux Tools Project/LTTng

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Revision as of 09:18, 6 June 2011 by D.u.thibault.bigfoot.com (Talk | contribs) (Configurations: grammar)

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Overview

LTTng is a tracer for Linux that has the capability to generate traces (from the kernel or an application) at a high rate with very low overhead. This is achieved by instrumenting the Linux kernel. LTTng is delivered as a set of kernel patches (to collect the traces) as well as a tool chain (to control, view and analyze the generated data).

The scope of this project is to provide an Eclipse integration of LTTng, in particular its LTTV component which is used to control, fetch and visualize the LTTng traces.

The project is being delivered in two components:

  • A Tracing and Monitoring Framework (TMF), a tracing tool-agnostic component that facilitates their integration in Eclipse
  • An LTTng reference implementation based on TMF

The Tracing and Monitoring Framework will provide a number of features:

  • Tracing project management
  • Support for very large trace files (that exceed available memory)
  • Online monitoring and trace streaming
  • Unified view for multiple, heterogeneous traces
  • Trace correlation
  • Out-of-the-box set of standard tracing views
  • Toolbox of tracing widgets that can be used to assemble application-specific views
  • Toolbox of statistical widgets
  • View synchronization mechanism
  • Clipboard support
  • Wizards for tracing/logging/monitoring application integration
  • Wizard for parser generation (CSV, XML, plain text, regular expressions, ...)

From a user's perspective, the main features of the LTTng integration are:

  • Control of the LTTng tracer running on a target node (remote or local)
  • Efficient retrieval and handling of LTTng trace files
  • Support for distributed, multi-processor, multi-core traces synchronization
  • Example of a third-party parsing library integration
  • Standard LTTV trace visualization, correlation and analysis views
  • Support for kernel and the upcoming user space tracing
  • State tracking system

Current Status

The current release (v0.2.0) implements the following features:

LTTng Perspective

  • Project View
  • Histogram View
  • Time Frame View
  • Events View
  • Control Flow View
  • Resources View
  • Statistics View
  • View Synchronization

LTTng structure

  • JNI integration of the C library
  • First integration of the LTTV State Provider
  • Integrated Help

Tracing and Monitoring Framework (TMF)

  • Generic Event model
  • Generic Trace model
  • Support for arbitrarily large traces
  • Support for custom trace parsers
  • Concurrent Data Request handling
  • Generic Events View

Limitations

  • Homogeneous LTTng trace support only

Configurations

The following LTTng trace formats are supported:

  • v 2.3
  • v 2.5
  • v 2.6

Future Plans

V0.3.0

  • LTTng Control (remote and local)
  • Parser Generator Wizard
  • Performance improvements
  • Bug fixes :-)

Screenshots

LTTngPerspective.png

LTTng Perspective

Video Demo

Coming (not so) soon.

Try it out

LTTng is not yet part of the Linux Tools delivery train. To give it a try, you will need to:

  • Checkout the plugins from the SVN repository
  • Download and install the LTTng parser library

For good measure, you should also consider downloading some sample LTTng traces (because they work :-)

Note that this currently only works for Linux.

Downloading LTTng and TMF plugins

You can checkout the project plugins out of SVN from eclipse.org at svn://dev.eclipse.org/svnroot/technology/org.eclipse.linuxtools.

You will need the following plugins under lttng/trunk:

  • org.eclipse.linuxtools.lttng
  • org.eclipse.linuxtools.lttng.help
  • org.eclipse.linuxtools.lttng.jni
  • org.eclipse.linuxtools.lttng.ui
  • org.eclipse.linuxtools.tmf
  • org.eclipse.linuxtools.tmf.ui

Downloading and installing the LTTng parser library

LTTV comes with a very efficient parsing library (in C) which was not re-implemented in Java for this project. Instead, the library is simply integrated using JNI.

This library is not delivered as part of Eclipse (licensing stuff) and has to be downloaded from the LTTng site, compiled and then installed.

To parse both 2.5 and 2.6 format LTTng traces, grab a snapshot (click the "snapshot" link next to the latest commit) of the following two git refs:

Build and install the 2.5 snapshot first, then the 2.6 snapshot. You should run, from within each traceformat directory:

$ ./autogen.sh --with-jni-interface --without-lttv && make
# make install

You will end up with something like:

$ ls -l1 /usr/local/lib
total 1048
-rwxr-xr-x. 1 root root 210300 2010-06-07 11:24 liblttvtraceread-2.5.so
-rwxr-xr-x. 1 root root 211052 2010-06-07 11:25 liblttvtraceread-2.6.so
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 316040 2010-06-07 11:25 liblttvtraceread.a
-rwxr-xr-x. 1 root root   1175 2010-06-07 11:25 liblttvtraceread.la
-rwxr-xr-x. 1 root root  93963 2010-06-07 11:24 liblttvtraceread_loader-2.5.so
-rwxr-xr-x. 1 root root  93963 2010-06-07 11:25 liblttvtraceread_loader-2.6.so
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 125442 2010-06-07 11:25 liblttvtraceread_loader.a
-rwxr-xr-x. 1 root root   1224 2010-06-07 11:25 liblttvtraceread_loader.la
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root     30 2010-06-07 11:25 liblttvtraceread_loader.so -> liblttvtraceread_loader-2.6.so
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root     23 2010-06-07 11:25 liblttvtraceread.so -> liblttvtraceread-2.6.so

To use these built libraries, start Eclipse with them on LD_LIBRARY_PATH:

LD_LIBRARY_PATH="/usr/local/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH" ./eclipse

The full installation procedure can be found in the LTTng User Guide. In Eclipse, switch to Help (Help > Help Contents) and open the LTTng User Guide. Follow the installation procedure from the "Getting Started/Installing the LTTng parsing library" page.

Note that you need the org.eclipse.linuxtools.lttng.help plugin to access that User Guide.

Sample LTTng traces

In Eclipse, switch to Help (Help > Help Contents) and open the LTTng User Guide. You can download sample traces from the "Getting Started/Samples" page.

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