Linux Symposium

A one day mini-summit (http://ltt.polymtl.ca/tracingwiki/index.php/TracingMiniSummit2009) on low overhead computer systems tracing will be held in Montreal, co-located with the Linux Symposium (http://www.linuxsymposium.org), on Tuesday July 14, 2009. It is organized by Dominique Toupin, Ericsson, Robert Charpentier, DRDC, Mario Couture, DRDC, and Michel Dagenais, Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal. It follows a prior Tracing workshop (http://ltt.polymtl.ca/tracingwiki/index.php/TracingSummit2008) held at Ericsson Research Montreal in January 2008. The objective of the mini-summit is to present the latest developments in low overhead kernel and user-space tracing, with emphasis on Linux and Multi-Core systems. A major push (http://wiki.eclipse.org/images/f/f1/ExtendedIDE_C_Linux_20090127.pdf) is underway to make tracing tools available from within popular integrated development environments such as Eclipse. This mini-summit will be a great forum to better understand and discuss the technical advantages of the different proposed techniques, algorithms, features and implementations. Please send suggestions and inquiries to tracingsummit@polymtl.ca.

09h00-09h45 François Chouinard, Ericsson Canada, The Eclipse Tracing and Monitoring Framework

The goal of this project is to provide an Eclipse-based framework to integrate tracing and monitoring tools. In addition to controlling the tracing tools, the framework allows the retrieval, analysis, correlation and visualization of heterogeneous and arbitrarily large trace files. As a proof of concept, a reference integration of LTTng is currently under development. The presentation will include a demonstration.

Work is currently being done to enhance GDB's Tracepoint feature. These are dynamic tracepoints that enable a user to instrument a live target with minimal impact to its execution. The collected data can then be used to examine the traced part of the execution. We will describe how dynamic tracepoints are being integrated within Eclipse and how a user will then be able to control and examine tracepoints and their resulting data. Depending on the progress of the implementation, we may be able to demo parts of this feature within Eclipse.

The Linux Tools project aims to bring a full-featured C and C++ IDE to Linux developers. Popular native development tools such as Valgrind, OProfile and Systemtap, are added to the existing C/C++ Eclipse tools. Current projects include a Valgrind heap usage analysis tool and an OProfile call profiling tool. The presenter will discuss the best way for the various implementations to avoid duplicating effort and bring these new development tools, including tracing and monitoring, to Linux.

With the project core approaching completeness, it's time to investigate its integration with other tools and technologies.

The new kernel tracing tools now available in the mainline kernel, and developed or merged into the kernel/trace section of the kernel will be described. The advantages, areas needing rework and missing features will be discussed.

System level tracing has been an important feature in enterprise servers (IRIX, AIX) and embedded systems (VxWorks, QNX, Embedded Linux distributions) for a long time. Early proposals for tracing tools in Linux, such as LKST, Kprobes/Dprobes and LTT, were not too well received. With the increasing importance of multi-core real-time performance, for both online servers and embedded systems, tracing tools are finally making their way into the mainline kernel, but not without extensive discussions, rework and modularization.

Panel: Tim Bird (Sony), Mathieu Desnoyers (Ecole Polytechnique), Christoph Hellwig (LST), Alf Larsson (Ericsson), Andrew Overholt (Red Hat), Frederic Weisbecker (Kernel developer)

Moderators: Michel Dagenais (Ecole Polytechnique) and Dominique Toupin (Ericsson)

Open discussion, birds of a feather session, on Tracing tools for Linux. The panel and audience brings together Linux kernel and tools developers, Linux distributors, user space developers and system users.

Tracing Summit

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Copyright © 2009 Linux Symposium Inc. All rights reserved.
Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

				Centre Mont-Royal Montreal, Canada July 13-17, 2009

Tracing Summit

register | call for papers Copyright © 2009 Linux Symposium Inc. All rights reserved. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

register | call for papers
Copyright © 2009 Linux Symposium Inc. All rights reserved.
Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.