Hi,

For the 1.0 Yocto release, we'd like to have as complete a set of
tracing and profiling tools as possible, enough so that most users will
be satisfied with what's available, but not so many as to produce a
maintenance burden.

The current set is pretty decent:

latencytop
powertop
lttng
lttng-ust
oprofile(ui)
trace-cmd
perf

but there seems to be an omission or two with respect to the current set
as packaged in Yocto, and there are a few other tools that I think would
make sense to add, either to address a gap in the current set, or
because they're popular enough to be missed by more than a couple
users:

KernelShark
perf trace scripting support
SystemTap
blktrace
sysprof

These are just my own opinions regarding what I think is missing - see
below for more details on each tool, and some reasons I think it would
make sense to include them. If you disagree, or even better, have
suggestions for other tools that you think are essential and missing,
please let me know. Otherwise, I plan on adding support for them to
Yocto in the very near future (e.g. starting next week).

Just one note - I know that some of these may not be appropriate for all
platforms; in those cases, I'd expect they just wouldn't be included in
the images for those machines. Actually, except for sysprof and
KernelShark, they all have modes that should allow them to be used with
minimal footprints on the target system, and even then I think both
KernelShark and sysprof could both be relatively easily retrofitted with
a remote layer like OprofileUI's that would make them lightweight on the
target.

Anyway, on to some descriptions of the tools themselves, followed by a
short summary at the end...

----

Tool: KernelShark
URL: http://rostedt.homelinux.com/kernelshark/
Architectures supported: all, nothing arch-specific

KernelShark is a front-end GUI interface to trace-cmd, a tracing tool
that's already included in the Yocto SDK (trace-cmd basically provides
an easier-to-use text-based interface to the raw debugfs tracing files
contained in /sys/kernel/debug/tracing).

Tracing can be started and stopped from the GUI; when the trace session
ends, the results are displayed in a couple of sub-windows: a graphical
area that displays events for each CPU but that can also display
per-task graphs, and a listbox that displays a detailed list of events
in the trace. In addition to display of raw events, it also supports
display of the output of the kernel's ftrace plugins
(/sys/kernel/debug/tracing/available_tracers) such as the function and
function_graph tracers, which are very useful on their own for figuring
out exactly what the kernel does in particular codepaths.

One very nice KernelShark feature is the ability to easily toggle the
individual events or event subsystems of interest; specifying these
manually is usually one of the most unpleasant parts of command-line
tracing, for this reason alone KernelShark is worth looking at, as it
makes the whole tracing experience much more manageable and enjoyable
(and therefore more likely to be used). Additionally, the extensive
support of filtering and searching is very useful. The GUI itself is
also extensible via Python plug-ins. All in all a great tool for
running and viewing traces.

Support for remote targets: The event subsystem and ftrace plugins that
provide the data for trace-cmd/KernelShark are completely implemented
within the kernel; both control and trace stream data retrieval are
accessed via debugfs files. The files that provide the data retrieval
function are accessible via splice, which means that the trace streams
could be easily sent over the network and processed on the host. The
current KernelShark code doesn't do that - currently the UI needs to run
on the target - but that would be an area where Yocto could add some
value - it shouldn't be a huge amount of effort to add that capability.
In the worst case, something along the lines of what OprofileUI does
(start/stop the trace on the target, and send the results back when
done) could also be acceptable as a local stopgap solution.

----

Tool: perf trace scripting support
URL: none, included in the kernel sources
Architectures supported: all, nothing arch-specific

Yocto already includes the 'perf' tool, which is a userspace tool that's
actually bundled as part of the mainline linux kernel source. 'perf
trace' is a subtool of perf that performs system-wide (or per-task)
event tracing and displays the raw trace event data using format strings
associated with each trace event. In fact, the events and event
descriptions used by perf are the same as those used by
trace-cmd/KernelShark to generate its traces (the kernel event
subsystem, see /sys/kernel/debug/tracing/events).

As is the case with KernelShark, the reams of raw trace data provided by
perf trace provide a lot of useful detail, but the question becomes how
to realistically extract useful high-level information from it. You
could sit down and pore through it for trends or specific conditions (no
fun, and it's not really humanly possible with large data sets).
Filtering can be used, but that only goes so far. Realistically, to
make sense of it, it needs to be 'boiled down' somehow into a more
manageable form. The fancy word for that is 'aggregation', which
basically just means 'sticking the important stuff in a hash table'.

The perf trace scripting support embeds scripting language interpreters
into perf to allow perf's internal event dispatch mechanism to call
script handlers directly (script handlers can also call back into perf).
The scripting_ops interface formalizes this interaction and allows any
scripting engine that implements the API to be used as a full-fledged
event-processing language - currently Python and Perl are implemented.

Events are exposed in the scripting interpreter as function calls, where
each param is an event field (in the event description pseudo-file for
the event in the kernel event subsystem). During processing, every
event in the trace stream is converted into a corresponding function
call in the scripting language. At that point, the handler can do
anything it want to using the available facilities of the scripting
language such as, for example, aggregate the event data in a hash table.

A starter script with handlers for each event type can be automatically
generated from existing trace data using the 'perf trace -g' command.
This allows for one-off, quick turnaround trace experiments. But
scripts can be 'promoted' to full-fledged 'perf trace' scripts that
essentially become part of perf and can be listed using 'perf trace -l'.
This involves simply writing a couple wrapper shell scripts and putting
them in the right places.

In general, perf trace scripting is a useful tool to have when the
standard set of off-the-shelf tools aren't really enough to analyze a
problem. To take a simple example, using tools like iostat you can get
a general statistical idea of the read/write activity on the system, but
those tools won't tell you which processes are actually responsible for
most of the I/O activity. The 'perf trace rw-by-pid' canned script in
perf trace uses the system-call read/write tracepoints
(sys_enter/exit_read/write) to capture all the reads and writes (and
failed reads/writes) of every process on the system and at the end
displays a detailed per-process summary of the results. That
information can be used to determine which processes are responsible for
the most I/O activity on the system, which can in turn be used to target
and drill down into the detailed read/write activity caused by a
specific process using for example the rw-by-file canned script which
displays the per-file read/write activity for a specific process.

To give a couple more concrete examples of how this capability can be
useful, here are some other examples of things that can only be done
with scripting, such as detecting complex or 'compound' events.

Simple hard-coded filters and triggers can scan data for simple
conditions e.g. someone tried to read /etc/passwd. This kind of thing
should be possible with the current event filtering capabilities even
without scripting support e.g. scan the event stream for events that
satisfy the condition:

event == vfs_open && filename == "/etc/passwd"

(This would tell you that someone tried to open /etc/password, but that
in itself isn't very useful - you'd really like to at least know who,
which of course could be accomplished by scripting.)

But a lot of other problems involve pattern matching over multiple
events. One example from a recent lkml posting:

The poster had noticed a certain inefficient pattern in block I/O data,
where multiple readahead requests resulted in an unnecessarily
inefficient pattern:

- queue first request
- plug queue
- queue second adjacent request
- merge
- unplug, issue, complete

In the case of readahead, latency is extremely important for throughput:
explicitly unplugging after each readahead increased throughput by 68%.
It's interesting to note that older kernels didn't have this problem,
but some unknown commit(s) introduced it.

This is the type of pattern that you would really need scripting support
in order to detect. A simple script to check for this condition and
detect a regression such as this could be quickly written and made
available, and possibly avoid the situation where a problem like this
could go undetected for a couple kernel revisions.

Perf and perf trace scripting also support 'live mode' (over the network
if desired), where the trace stream is processed as soon as it's
generated. Getting back to the "/etc/password" example - as mentioned,
something an administrator might want would be to monitor accesses to
"/etc/passwd" and see who's trying to access it. With live mode, a
continuously running script could monitor sys_open calls, compare the
opened filename against "/etc/passwd", get the uid and look up username
to find out who's trying to read it, and have the Python script e-mail
the culprit's name to the admin when detected.

Baically, live-mode allows for long-running trace sessions that can
continuously scan for rare conditions. Referring back to the readahead
example, one assumption the poster made was that "merging of a readahead
window with anything other than its own sibling" would be extremely
rare. A long-running script could easily be written to detect this
exact condition and either confirm or refute that assumption, which
would be hard to do without some kind of scripting support.

Perf trace scripting is relatively new, so there aren't yet a lot of
real-world examples - currently there are about 15 canned scripts
available (see 'perf trace -l') including the rw-by-pid and rw-by-file
examples described above.

The main data source for perf trace scripting are the statically defined
trace events defined in /sys/kernel/debug/tracing/events. It's also
possible to use the dynamic event sources available from the 'perf
probe' tool, but this is still an area of active integration at the
moment.

Support for remote targets: perf and perf trace scripting 'live-mode'
support allows the trace stream to be piped over the network using e.g.
netcat. Using that mode, the target does nothing but generate the trace
stream and send it over the network to the host, where a live-mode
script can be applied to it. Even so, this is probably not the most
efficient way to transfer trace data - one hope would be that perf would
add support for splice, but that's uncertain at this point.

----

Tool: SystemTap
URL: http://sourceware.org/systemtap/
Architectures supported: x86, x86_64, ppc, ppc64, ia64, s390, arm

SystemTap is also a system-wide tracing tool that allows users to write
scripts that attach handlers to events and perform complex aggregation
and filtering of the event stream. It's been around for a long time and
thus has a lot of canned scripts available, which make use of a set of
general-purpose script-support libraries called 'tapsets' (see the
SystemTap wiki, off of the above link).

The language used to write SystemTap scripts isn't however a
general-purpose language like Perl or Python, but rather a C-like
language defined specifically for SystemTap. The reason for that has to
do with the way SystemTap works - SystemTap scripts are executed in the
kernel, which makes general-purpose language runtimes off-limits.
Basically what SystemTap does is translate a user script into an
equivalent C version, which is then compiled into a kernel module.
Inserting the kernel module attaches the C code to specific event
sources in the kernel - whenever an event is hit, the corresponding
event handler is invoked and does whatever it's told to do - usually
this is updating a counter in a hash table or something similar. When
the tracing session exits, the script typically calculates and displays
a summary of the aggregation(s), or whatever the user wants it to do.

In addition to the standard set of event sources (the static kernel
tracepoint events, and dynamic events via kprobes) SystemTap also
supports user space probing if the kernel is built with utrace support.
User space probing can be done either dynamically, or statically if the
application contains static tracepoints. A very interesting aspect of
this is that via dtrace-compatible markers, the existing static dtrace
tracepoints contained in, for example, the Java or Python runtimes can
also be used as event sources (e.g. if they're compiled with
--enable-dtrace). This should allow any Python or Java application to
be much more meaningfully traced and profiled using SystemTap - for
example, with complete userspace support theoretically every detail of
say an http request to a Java web application could be followed, from
the network device driver to the web server through a Java servlet and
back out through the kernel again. Supporting this however, in addition
to having utrace support in the kernel, might also require some
SystemTap-specific patches to the affected applications. Users can also
instrument their own applications using static tracepoints
(http://sourceware.org/systemtap/wiki/AddingUserSpaceProbingToApps).

As mentioned, there are a whole host of scripts available. Examples
include everything from per-process network traffic monitoring,
packet-drop monitoring, per-process disk I/O times, to the same types of
applications described above for 'perf trace scripting). There are too
many to usefully cover here, see
http://sourceware.org/systemtap/examples/keyword-index.html for a
complete list of the available scripts. Everything in SystemTap is also
very well documented - there are tutorials, handbooks, and a bunch of
useful information on the wiki such as 'War Stories' and deep-dives into
other use cases i.e. there's no shortage of useful info for new (and
old) users. I won't cover any specific examples here - basically all of
the motivations and capabilities described above for 'perf trace
scripting' should apply equally well to SystemTap, and won't be repeated
here.

Support for remote targets: SystemTap supports a cross-instrumentation
mode, where only the SystemTap run-time needs to be available on the
target. The instrumentation kernel module derived from a myscript.stp
generated on host (stap -r kernel_version myscript.stp -m module_name)
is copied over to target and executed via staprun 'myscript.ko'.

However, apparently host and target must still be the same architecture
for this to work.

----

Tool: blktrace
URL: http://linux.die.net/man/8/blktrace
Architectures supported: all, nothing arch-specific

Still the best way to get detailed disk I/O traces, and you can do some
really cool things with it:

http://feedblog.org/2010/04/27/2009/

Support for remote targets: Uses splice/sendfile, so the target can if
it wants do nothing but generate the trace data and send it over the
network. blkparse, the data collection portion of blktrace, fully
supports this mode and in fact encourages it in order to avoid
perturbing the results that occur when writing trace data on the target.

----

Tool: sysprof
URL: http://www.daimi.au.dk/~sandmann/sysprof/
Architectures supported: all, nothing arch-specific

A nice simple system-wide profiling UI - it profiles the kernel and all
running userspace applications. It displays functions in one window, and
an expandable tree of callees for the selected function in the the other
window, all with hit stats. Clicking on a callee in the callee window
shows callers of that function in a third window.

I don't know if this provides much more than OprofileUI, but the
interface is nice and it's popular in some quarters...

----

In summary, each of these tools provides a unique set of useful
capabilities that I think would be very nice to have in Yocto. There
are of course overlaps e.g. both SystemTap and trace-cmd provide
function-callgraph tracing, both trace-cmd and perf trace provide
event-subsystem-based tracing, SystemTap and perf trace scripting both
provide different ways of achieving the same kinds of high-level
aggregation goals, while blktrace, SystemTap, and perf trace scripting
all provide different ways of looking at block I/O. But they also each
have their own strengths as well, and do much more than what they do in
overlap.

At some point some of the these tools will be completely overlap each
other - for example SystemTap and/or perf trace scripting eventually
will probably do everything blktrace does, and will additionally have
the potential to show that information in a larger context e.g. along
with VFS and/or mm data sources. Making things like that happen -
adding value to those tools or providing larger contexts could be a
focus for future Yocto contributions. On the other hand, it may make
sense in v1.0 to spend a small amount of development time to actually
help provide some coherent integration to all these tools and maybe
contribute to something like perfkit (http://audidude.com/?p=504).
There may not be time to do that, but at least the minimum set of tools
for a great user experience should be available, which I think the above
list goes a long way to providing. Comments welcome...

Tom

Here's another thread about sysprof, my question is should we support both
oprofile and sysprof or we should be using sysprof which seems a better
tool...

Hi Rob,

Could you please tell us how to contribute to oprofileUI? The

yoctoproject.org is using oprofileUI as a profiling tool, and during the
development we found some bugs of oprofileUI and want to contribute our
patches to fix it.

Okay. Interesting... :-) i'll expedite the move to the gnome
infrastructure. These days most of what you can do with OprofileUI you
shouldn't and instead should look at using the sysprof daemon and then
sysprof GUI. (Given that sysprof builds on perf counters and so isn't
x86 specific any longer.)

Cheerio,

Rob

Zanussi, Tom wrote:

Hi,

For the 1.0 Yocto release, we'd like to have as complete a set of
tracing and profiling tools as possible, enough so that most users
will be satisfied with what's available, but not so many as to
produce a maintenance burden.

The current set is pretty decent:

latencytop
powertop
lttng
lttng-ust
oprofile(ui)
trace-cmd
perf

but there seems to be an omission or two with respect to the current
set as packaged in Yocto, and there are a few other tools that I
think would make sense to add, either to address a gap in the current
set, or because they're popular enough to be missed by more than a
couple users:

KernelShark
perf trace scripting support
SystemTap
blktrace
sysprof

These are just my own opinions regarding what I think is missing - see
below for more details on each tool, and some reasons I think it would
make sense to include them. If you disagree, or even better, have
suggestions for other tools that you think are essential and missing,
please let me know. Otherwise, I plan on adding support for them to
Yocto in the very near future (e.g. starting next week).

Just one note - I know that some of these may not be appropriate for
all platforms; in those cases, I'd expect they just wouldn't be
included in the images for those machines. Actually, except for
sysprof and KernelShark, they all have modes that should allow them
to be used with minimal footprints on the target system, and even
then I think both KernelShark and sysprof could both be relatively
easily retrofitted with a remote layer like OprofileUI's that would
make them lightweight on the target.

Anyway, on to some descriptions of the tools themselves, followed by a
short summary at the end...

----

Tool: KernelShark
URL: http://rostedt.homelinux.com/kernelshark/
Architectures supported: all, nothing arch-specific

KernelShark is a front-end GUI interface to trace-cmd, a tracing tool
that's already included in the Yocto SDK (trace-cmd basically provides
an easier-to-use text-based interface to the raw debugfs tracing files
contained in /sys/kernel/debug/tracing).

Tracing can be started and stopped from the GUI; when the trace
session ends, the results are displayed in a couple of sub-windows: a
graphical area that displays events for each CPU but that can also
display per-task graphs, and a listbox that displays a detailed list
of events in the trace. In addition to display of raw events, it
also supports display of the output of the kernel's ftrace plugins
(/sys/kernel/debug/tracing/available_tracers) such as the function and
function_graph tracers, which are very useful on their own for
figuring out exactly what the kernel does in particular codepaths.

One very nice KernelShark feature is the ability to easily toggle the
individual events or event subsystems of interest; specifying these
manually is usually one of the most unpleasant parts of command-line
tracing, for this reason alone KernelShark is worth looking at, as it
makes the whole tracing experience much more manageable and enjoyable
(and therefore more likely to be used). Additionally, the extensive
support of filtering and searching is very useful. The GUI itself is
also extensible via Python plug-ins. All in all a great tool for
running and viewing traces.

Support for remote targets: The event subsystem and ftrace plugins
that provide the data for trace-cmd/KernelShark are completely
implemented within the kernel; both control and trace stream data
retrieval are accessed via debugfs files. The files that provide the
data retrieval function are accessible via splice, which means that
the trace streams could be easily sent over the network and processed
on the host. The current KernelShark code doesn't do that -
currently the UI needs to run on the target - but that would be an
area where Yocto could add some value - it shouldn't be a huge amount
of effort to add that capability. In the worst case, something along
the lines of what OprofileUI does (start/stop the trace on the
target, and send the results back when done) could also be acceptable
as a local stopgap solution.

----

Tool: perf trace scripting support
URL: none, included in the kernel sources
Architectures supported: all, nothing arch-specific

Yocto already includes the 'perf' tool, which is a userspace tool
that's actually bundled as part of the mainline linux kernel source.
'perf trace' is a subtool of perf that performs system-wide (or
per-task) event tracing and displays the raw trace event data using
format strings associated with each trace event. In fact, the events
and event descriptions used by perf are the same as those used by
trace-cmd/KernelShark to generate its traces (the kernel event
subsystem, see /sys/kernel/debug/tracing/events).

As is the case with KernelShark, the reams of raw trace data provided
by perf trace provide a lot of useful detail, but the question
becomes how to realistically extract useful high-level information
from it. You could sit down and pore through it for trends or
specific conditions (no fun, and it's not really humanly possible
with large data sets). Filtering can be used, but that only goes so
far. Realistically, to make sense of it, it needs to be 'boiled
down' somehow into a more manageable form. The fancy word for that
is 'aggregation', which basically just means 'sticking the important
stuff in a hash table'.

The perf trace scripting support embeds scripting language
interpreters into perf to allow perf's internal event dispatch
mechanism to call script handlers directly (script handlers can also
call back into perf). The scripting_ops interface formalizes this
interaction and allows any scripting engine that implements the API
to be used as a full-fledged event-processing language - currently
Python and Perl are implemented.

Events are exposed in the scripting interpreter as function calls,
where each param is an event field (in the event description
pseudo-file for the event in the kernel event subsystem). During
processing, every event in the trace stream is converted into a
corresponding function call in the scripting language. At that
point, the handler can do anything it want to using the available
facilities of the scripting language such as, for example, aggregate
the event data in a hash table.

A starter script with handlers for each event type can be
automatically generated from existing trace data using the 'perf
trace -g' command. This allows for one-off, quick turnaround trace
experiments. But scripts can be 'promoted' to full-fledged 'perf
trace' scripts that essentially become part of perf and can be listed
using 'perf trace -l'. This involves simply writing a couple wrapper
shell scripts and putting them in the right places.

In general, perf trace scripting is a useful tool to have when the
standard set of off-the-shelf tools aren't really enough to analyze a
problem. To take a simple example, using tools like iostat you can
get a general statistical idea of the read/write activity on the
system, but those tools won't tell you which processes are actually
responsible for most of the I/O activity. The 'perf trace rw-by-pid'
canned script in perf trace uses the system-call read/write
tracepoints (sys_enter/exit_read/write) to capture all the reads and
writes (and failed reads/writes) of every process on the system and
at the end displays a detailed per-process summary of the results.
That information can be used to determine which processes are
responsible for the most I/O activity on the system, which can in
turn be used to target and drill down into the detailed read/write
activity caused by a specific process using for example the
rw-by-file canned script which displays the per-file read/write
activity for a specific process.

To give a couple more concrete examples of how this capability can be
useful, here are some other examples of things that can only be done
with scripting, such as detecting complex or 'compound' events.

Simple hard-coded filters and triggers can scan data for simple
conditions e.g. someone tried to read /etc/passwd. This kind of thing
should be possible with the current event filtering capabilities even
without scripting support e.g. scan the event stream for events that
satisfy the condition:

event == vfs_open && filename == "/etc/passwd"

(This would tell you that someone tried to open /etc/password, but
that in itself isn't very useful - you'd really like to at least know
who, which of course could be accomplished by scripting.)

But a lot of other problems involve pattern matching over multiple
events. One example from a recent lkml posting:

The poster had noticed a certain inefficient pattern in block I/O
data, where multiple readahead requests resulted in an unnecessarily
inefficient pattern:

- queue first request
- plug queue
- queue second adjacent request
- merge
- unplug, issue, complete

In the case of readahead, latency is extremely important for
throughput: explicitly unplugging after each readahead increased
throughput by 68%. It's interesting to note that older kernels didn't
have this problem, but some unknown commit(s) introduced it.

This is the type of pattern that you would really need scripting
support in order to detect. A simple script to check for this
condition and detect a regression such as this could be quickly
written and made available, and possibly avoid the situation where a
problem like this could go undetected for a couple kernel revisions.

Perf and perf trace scripting also support 'live mode' (over the
network if desired), where the trace stream is processed as soon as
it's generated. Getting back to the "/etc/password" example - as
mentioned, something an administrator might want would be to monitor
accesses to "/etc/passwd" and see who's trying to access it. With
live mode, a continuously running script could monitor sys_open
calls, compare the opened filename against "/etc/passwd", get the uid
and look up username to find out who's trying to read it, and have
the Python script e-mail the culprit's name to the admin when
detected.

Baically, live-mode allows for long-running trace sessions that can
continuously scan for rare conditions. Referring back to the
readahead example, one assumption the poster made was that "merging
of a readahead window with anything other than its own sibling" would
be extremely rare. A long-running script could easily be written to
detect this exact condition and either confirm or refute that
assumption, which would be hard to do without some kind of scripting
support.

Perf trace scripting is relatively new, so there aren't yet a lot of
real-world examples - currently there are about 15 canned scripts
available (see 'perf trace -l') including the rw-by-pid and rw-by-file
examples described above.

The main data source for perf trace scripting are the statically
defined trace events defined in /sys/kernel/debug/tracing/events.
It's also possible to use the dynamic event sources available from
the 'perf probe' tool, but this is still an area of active
integration at the moment.

Support for remote targets: perf and perf trace scripting 'live-mode'
support allows the trace stream to be piped over the network using
e.g. netcat. Using that mode, the target does nothing but generate
the trace stream and send it over the network to the host, where a
live-mode script can be applied to it. Even so, this is probably not
the most efficient way to transfer trace data - one hope would be
that perf would add support for splice, but that's uncertain at this
point.

----

Tool: SystemTap
URL: http://sourceware.org/systemtap/
Architectures supported: x86, x86_64, ppc, ppc64, ia64, s390, arm

SystemTap is also a system-wide tracing tool that allows users to
write scripts that attach handlers to events and perform complex
aggregation and filtering of the event stream. It's been around for
a long time and thus has a lot of canned scripts available, which
make use of a set of general-purpose script-support libraries called
'tapsets' (see the SystemTap wiki, off of the above link).

The language used to write SystemTap scripts isn't however a
general-purpose language like Perl or Python, but rather a C-like
language defined specifically for SystemTap. The reason for that has
to do with the way SystemTap works - SystemTap scripts are executed
in the kernel, which makes general-purpose language runtimes
off-limits. Basically what SystemTap does is translate a user script
into an equivalent C version, which is then compiled into a kernel
module. Inserting the kernel module attaches the C code to specific
event sources in the kernel - whenever an event is hit, the
corresponding event handler is invoked and does whatever it's told to
do - usually this is updating a counter in a hash table or something
similar. When the tracing session exits, the script typically
calculates and displays a summary of the aggregation(s), or whatever
the user wants it to do.

In addition to the standard set of event sources (the static kernel
tracepoint events, and dynamic events via kprobes) SystemTap also
supports user space probing if the kernel is built with utrace
support. User space probing can be done either dynamically, or
statically if the application contains static tracepoints. A very
interesting aspect of this is that via dtrace-compatible markers, the
existing static dtrace tracepoints contained in, for example, the
Java or Python runtimes can also be used as event sources (e.g. if
they're compiled with --enable-dtrace). This should allow any Python
or Java application to be much more meaningfully traced and profiled
using SystemTap - for example, with complete userspace support
theoretically every detail of say an http request to a Java web
application could be followed, from the network device driver to the
web server through a Java servlet and back out through the kernel
again. Supporting this however, in addition to having utrace support
in the kernel, might also require some SystemTap-specific patches to
the affected applications. Users can also instrument their own
applications using static tracepoints
(http://sourceware.org/systemtap/wiki/AddingUserSpaceProbingToApps).

As mentioned, there are a whole host of scripts available. Examples
include everything from per-process network traffic monitoring,
packet-drop monitoring, per-process disk I/O times, to the same types
of applications described above for 'perf trace scripting). There
are too many to usefully cover here, see
http://sourceware.org/systemtap/examples/keyword-index.html for a
complete list of the available scripts. Everything in SystemTap is
also very well documented - there are tutorials, handbooks, and a
bunch of useful information on the wiki such as 'War Stories' and
deep-dives into other use cases i.e. there's no shortage of useful
info for new (and old) users. I won't cover any specific examples
here - basically all of the motivations and capabilities described
above for 'perf trace scripting' should apply equally well to
SystemTap, and won't be repeated here.

Support for remote targets: SystemTap supports a cross-instrumentation
mode, where only the SystemTap run-time needs to be available on the
target. The instrumentation kernel module derived from a myscript.stp
generated on host (stap -r kernel_version myscript.stp -m module_name)
is copied over to target and executed via staprun 'myscript.ko'.

However, apparently host and target must still be the same
architecture for this to work.

----

Tool: blktrace
URL: http://linux.die.net/man/8/blktrace
Architectures supported: all, nothing arch-specific

Still the best way to get detailed disk I/O traces, and you can do
some really cool things with it:

http://feedblog.org/2010/04/27/2009/

Support for remote targets: Uses splice/sendfile, so the target can
if it wants do nothing but generate the trace data and send it over
the network. blkparse, the data collection portion of blktrace, fully
supports this mode and in fact encourages it in order to avoid
perturbing the results that occur when writing trace data on the
target.

----

Tool: sysprof
URL: http://www.daimi.au.dk/~sandmann/sysprof/
Architectures supported: all, nothing arch-specific

A nice simple system-wide profiling UI - it profiles the kernel and
all running userspace applications. It displays functions in one
window, and an expandable tree of callees for the selected function
in the the other window, all with hit stats. Clicking on a callee in
the callee window shows callers of that function in a third window.

I don't know if this provides much more than OprofileUI, but the
interface is nice and it's popular in some quarters...

----

In summary, each of these tools provides a unique set of useful
capabilities that I think would be very nice to have in Yocto. There
are of course overlaps e.g. both SystemTap and trace-cmd provide
function-callgraph tracing, both trace-cmd and perf trace provide
event-subsystem-based tracing, SystemTap and perf trace scripting both
provide different ways of achieving the same kinds of high-level
aggregation goals, while blktrace, SystemTap, and perf trace scripting
all provide different ways of looking at block I/O. But they also
each have their own strengths as well, and do much more than what
they do in overlap.

At some point some of the these tools will be completely overlap each
other - for example SystemTap and/or perf trace scripting eventually
will probably do everything blktrace does, and will additionally have
the potential to show that information in a larger context e.g. along
with VFS and/or mm data sources. Making things like that happen -
adding value to those tools or providing larger contexts could be a
focus for future Yocto contributions. On the other hand, it may make
sense in v1.0 to spend a small amount of development time to actually
help provide some coherent integration to all these tools and maybe
contribute to something like perfkit (http://audidude.com/?p=504).
There may not be time to do that, but at least the minimum set of
tools for a great user experience should be available, which I think
the above list goes a long way to providing. Comments welcome...

Tom

On 10-11-12 5:29 PM, Zhang, Jessica wrote:

Here's another thread about sysprof, my question is should we support both
oprofile and sysprof or we should be using sysprof which seems a better
tool...

Both. There's still no one tracer to rule them all (*cough*
perf *cough*), and until there is some real unification it
is best to support the various tracers.

In particular oprofile is easy enough to enable, is known
to work on many boards (in particular semi vendor boards)
and works with the -rt kernels.

We have the ability to dynamically enable and disable the
various tracers at build (and of course boot) time with some
easy selection of kernel profiles, so I recommend going for
broad support at the moment.

Bruce

Hi Rob,

Could you please tell us how to contribute to oprofileUI? The

yoctoproject.org is using oprofileUI as a profiling tool, and during the
development we found some bugs of oprofileUI and want to contribute our
patches to fix it.

Okay. Interesting... :-) i'll expedite the move to the gnome
infrastructure. These days most of what you can do with OprofileUI you
shouldn't and instead should look at using the sysprof daemon and then
sysprof GUI. (Given that sysprof builds on perf counters and so isn't
x86 specific any longer.)

Cheerio,

Rob

Zanussi, Tom wrote:

Hi,

For the 1.0 Yocto release, we'd like to have as complete a set of
tracing and profiling tools as possible, enough so that most users
will be satisfied with what's available, but not so many as to
produce a maintenance burden.

The current set is pretty decent:

latencytop
powertop
lttng
lttng-ust
oprofile(ui)
trace-cmd
perf

but there seems to be an omission or two with respect to the current
set as packaged in Yocto, and there are a few other tools that I
think would make sense to add, either to address a gap in the current
set, or because they're popular enough to be missed by more than a
couple users:

KernelShark
perf trace scripting support
SystemTap
blktrace
sysprof

These are just my own opinions regarding what I think is missing - see
below for more details on each tool, and some reasons I think it would
make sense to include them. If you disagree, or even better, have
suggestions for other tools that you think are essential and missing,
please let me know. Otherwise, I plan on adding support for them to
Yocto in the very near future (e.g. starting next week).

Just one note - I know that some of these may not be appropriate for
all platforms; in those cases, I'd expect they just wouldn't be
included in the images for those machines. Actually, except for
sysprof and KernelShark, they all have modes that should allow them
to be used with minimal footprints on the target system, and even
then I think both KernelShark and sysprof could both be relatively
easily retrofitted with a remote layer like OprofileUI's that would
make them lightweight on the target.

Anyway, on to some descriptions of the tools themselves, followed by a
short summary at the end...

----

Tool: KernelShark
URL: http://rostedt.homelinux.com/kernelshark/
Architectures supported: all, nothing arch-specific

KernelShark is a front-end GUI interface to trace-cmd, a tracing tool
that's already included in the Yocto SDK (trace-cmd basically provides
an easier-to-use text-based interface to the raw debugfs tracing files
contained in /sys/kernel/debug/tracing).

Tracing can be started and stopped from the GUI; when the trace
session ends, the results are displayed in a couple of sub-windows: a
graphical area that displays events for each CPU but that can also
display per-task graphs, and a listbox that displays a detailed list
of events in the trace. In addition to display of raw events, it
also supports display of the output of the kernel's ftrace plugins
(/sys/kernel/debug/tracing/available_tracers) such as the function and
function_graph tracers, which are very useful on their own for
figuring out exactly what the kernel does in particular codepaths.

One very nice KernelShark feature is the ability to easily toggle the
individual events or event subsystems of interest; specifying these
manually is usually one of the most unpleasant parts of command-line
tracing, for this reason alone KernelShark is worth looking at, as it
makes the whole tracing experience much more manageable and enjoyable
(and therefore more likely to be used). Additionally, the extensive
support of filtering and searching is very useful. The GUI itself is
also extensible via Python plug-ins. All in all a great tool for
running and viewing traces.

Support for remote targets: The event subsystem and ftrace plugins
that provide the data for trace-cmd/KernelShark are completely
implemented within the kernel; both control and trace stream data
retrieval are accessed via debugfs files. The files that provide the
data retrieval function are accessible via splice, which means that
the trace streams could be easily sent over the network and processed
on the host. The current KernelShark code doesn't do that -
currently the UI needs to run on the target - but that would be an
area where Yocto could add some value - it shouldn't be a huge amount
of effort to add that capability. In the worst case, something along
the lines of what OprofileUI does (start/stop the trace on the
target, and send the results back when done) could also be acceptable
as a local stopgap solution.

----

Tool: perf trace scripting support
URL: none, included in the kernel sources
Architectures supported: all, nothing arch-specific

Yocto already includes the 'perf' tool, which is a userspace tool
that's actually bundled as part of the mainline linux kernel source.
'perf trace' is a subtool of perf that performs system-wide (or
per-task) event tracing and displays the raw trace event data using
format strings associated with each trace event. In fact, the events
and event descriptions used by perf are the same as those used by
trace-cmd/KernelShark to generate its traces (the kernel event
subsystem, see /sys/kernel/debug/tracing/events).

As is the case with KernelShark, the reams of raw trace data provided
by perf trace provide a lot of useful detail, but the question
becomes how to realistically extract useful high-level information
from it. You could sit down and pore through it for trends or
specific conditions (no fun, and it's not really humanly possible
with large data sets). Filtering can be used, but that only goes so
far. Realistically, to make sense of it, it needs to be 'boiled
down' somehow into a more manageable form. The fancy word for that
is 'aggregation', which basically just means 'sticking the important
stuff in a hash table'.

The perf trace scripting support embeds scripting language
interpreters into perf to allow perf's internal event dispatch
mechanism to call script handlers directly (script handlers can also
call back into perf). The scripting_ops interface formalizes this
interaction and allows any scripting engine that implements the API
to be used as a full-fledged event-processing language - currently
Python and Perl are implemented.

Events are exposed in the scripting interpreter as function calls,
where each param is an event field (in the event description
pseudo-file for the event in the kernel event subsystem). During
processing, every event in the trace stream is converted into a
corresponding function call in the scripting language. At that
point, the handler can do anything it want to using the available
facilities of the scripting language such as, for example, aggregate
the event data in a hash table.

A starter script with handlers for each event type can be
automatically generated from existing trace data using the 'perf
trace -g' command. This allows for one-off, quick turnaround trace
experiments. But scripts can be 'promoted' to full-fledged 'perf
trace' scripts that essentially become part of perf and can be listed
using 'perf trace -l'. This involves simply writing a couple wrapper
shell scripts and putting them in the right places.

In general, perf trace scripting is a useful tool to have when the
standard set of off-the-shelf tools aren't really enough to analyze a
problem. To take a simple example, using tools like iostat you can
get a general statistical idea of the read/write activity on the
system, but those tools won't tell you which processes are actually
responsible for most of the I/O activity. The 'perf trace rw-by-pid'
canned script in perf trace uses the system-call read/write
tracepoints (sys_enter/exit_read/write) to capture all the reads and
writes (and failed reads/writes) of every process on the system and
at the end displays a detailed per-process summary of the results.
That information can be used to determine which processes are
responsible for the most I/O activity on the system, which can in
turn be used to target and drill down into the detailed read/write
activity caused by a specific process using for example the
rw-by-file canned script which displays the per-file read/write
activity for a specific process.

To give a couple more concrete examples of how this capability can be
useful, here are some other examples of things that can only be done
with scripting, such as detecting complex or 'compound' events.

Simple hard-coded filters and triggers can scan data for simple
conditions e.g. someone tried to read /etc/passwd. This kind of thing
should be possible with the current event filtering capabilities even
without scripting support e.g. scan the event stream for events that
satisfy the condition:

event == vfs_open&& filename == "/etc/passwd"

(This would tell you that someone tried to open /etc/password, but
that in itself isn't very useful - you'd really like to at least know
who, which of course could be accomplished by scripting.)

But a lot of other problems involve pattern matching over multiple
events. One example from a recent lkml posting:

The poster had noticed a certain inefficient pattern in block I/O
data, where multiple readahead requests resulted in an unnecessarily
inefficient pattern:

- queue first request
- plug queue
- queue second adjacent request
- merge
- unplug, issue, complete

In the case of readahead, latency is extremely important for
throughput: explicitly unplugging after each readahead increased
throughput by 68%. It's interesting to note that older kernels didn't
have this problem, but some unknown commit(s) introduced it.

This is the type of pattern that you would really need scripting
support in order to detect. A simple script to check for this
condition and detect a regression such as this could be quickly
written and made available, and possibly avoid the situation where a
problem like this could go undetected for a couple kernel revisions.

Perf and perf trace scripting also support 'live mode' (over the
network if desired), where the trace stream is processed as soon as
it's generated. Getting back to the "/etc/password" example - as
mentioned, something an administrator might want would be to monitor
accesses to "/etc/passwd" and see who's trying to access it. With
live mode, a continuously running script could monitor sys_open
calls, compare the opened filename against "/etc/passwd", get the uid
and look up username to find out who's trying to read it, and have
the Python script e-mail the culprit's name to the admin when
detected.

Baically, live-mode allows for long-running trace sessions that can
continuously scan for rare conditions. Referring back to the
readahead example, one assumption the poster made was that "merging
of a readahead window with anything other than its own sibling" would
be extremely rare. A long-running script could easily be written to
detect this exact condition and either confirm or refute that
assumption, which would be hard to do without some kind of scripting
support.

Perf trace scripting is relatively new, so there aren't yet a lot of
real-world examples - currently there are about 15 canned scripts
available (see 'perf trace -l') including the rw-by-pid and rw-by-file
examples described above.

The main data source for perf trace scripting are the statically
defined trace events defined in /sys/kernel/debug/tracing/events.
It's also possible to use the dynamic event sources available from
the 'perf probe' tool, but this is still an area of active
integration at the moment.

Support for remote targets: perf and perf trace scripting 'live-mode'
support allows the trace stream to be piped over the network using
e.g. netcat. Using that mode, the target does nothing but generate
the trace stream and send it over the network to the host, where a
live-mode script can be applied to it. Even so, this is probably not
the most efficient way to transfer trace data - one hope would be
that perf would add support for splice, but that's uncertain at this
point.

----

Tool: SystemTap
URL: http://sourceware.org/systemtap/
Architectures supported: x86, x86_64, ppc, ppc64, ia64, s390, arm

SystemTap is also a system-wide tracing tool that allows users to
write scripts that attach handlers to events and perform complex
aggregation and filtering of the event stream. It's been around for
a long time and thus has a lot of canned scripts available, which
make use of a set of general-purpose script-support libraries called
'tapsets' (see the SystemTap wiki, off of the above link).

The language used to write SystemTap scripts isn't however a
general-purpose language like Perl or Python, but rather a C-like
language defined specifically for SystemTap. The reason for that has
to do with the way SystemTap works - SystemTap scripts are executed
in the kernel, which makes general-purpose language runtimes
off-limits. Basically what SystemTap does is translate a user script
into an equivalent C version, which is then compiled into a kernel
module. Inserting the kernel module attaches the C code to specific
event sources in the kernel - whenever an event is hit, the
corresponding event handler is invoked and does whatever it's told to
do - usually this is updating a counter in a hash table or something
similar. When the tracing session exits, the script typically
calculates and displays a summary of the aggregation(s), or whatever
the user wants it to do.

In addition to the standard set of event sources (the static kernel
tracepoint events, and dynamic events via kprobes) SystemTap also
supports user space probing if the kernel is built with utrace
support. User space probing can be done either dynamically, or
statically if the application contains static tracepoints. A very
interesting aspect of this is that via dtrace-compatible markers, the
existing static dtrace tracepoints contained in, for example, the
Java or Python runtimes can also be used as event sources (e.g. if
they're compiled with --enable-dtrace). This should allow any Python
or Java application to be much more meaningfully traced and profiled
using SystemTap - for example, with complete userspace support
theoretically every detail of say an http request to a Java web
application could be followed, from the network device driver to the
web server through a Java servlet and back out through the kernel
again. Supporting this however, in addition to having utrace support
in the kernel, might also require some SystemTap-specific patches to
the affected applications. Users can also instrument their own
applications using static tracepoints
(http://sourceware.org/systemtap/wiki/AddingUserSpaceProbingToApps).

As mentioned, there are a whole host of scripts available. Examples
include everything from per-process network traffic monitoring,
packet-drop monitoring, per-process disk I/O times, to the same types
of applications described above for 'perf trace scripting). There
are too many to usefully cover here, see
http://sourceware.org/systemtap/examples/keyword-index.html for a
complete list of the available scripts. Everything in SystemTap is
also very well documented - there are tutorials, handbooks, and a
bunch of useful information on the wiki such as 'War Stories' and
deep-dives into other use cases i.e. there's no shortage of useful
info for new (and old) users. I won't cover any specific examples
here - basically all of the motivations and capabilities described
above for 'perf trace scripting' should apply equally well to
SystemTap, and won't be repeated here.

Support for remote targets: SystemTap supports a cross-instrumentation
mode, where only the SystemTap run-time needs to be available on the
target. The instrumentation kernel module derived from a myscript.stp
generated on host (stap -r kernel_version myscript.stp -m module_name)
is copied over to target and executed via staprun 'myscript.ko'.

However, apparently host and target must still be the same
architecture for this to work.

----

Tool: blktrace
URL: http://linux.die.net/man/8/blktrace
Architectures supported: all, nothing arch-specific

Still the best way to get detailed disk I/O traces, and you can do
some really cool things with it:

http://feedblog.org/2010/04/27/2009/

Support for remote targets: Uses splice/sendfile, so the target can
if it wants do nothing but generate the trace data and send it over
the network. blkparse, the data collection portion of blktrace, fully
supports this mode and in fact encourages it in order to avoid
perturbing the results that occur when writing trace data on the
target.

----

Tool: sysprof
URL: http://www.daimi.au.dk/~sandmann/sysprof/
Architectures supported: all, nothing arch-specific

A nice simple system-wide profiling UI - it profiles the kernel and
all running userspace applications. It displays functions in one
window, and an expandable tree of callees for the selected function
in the the other window, all with hit stats. Clicking on a callee in
the callee window shows callers of that function in a third window.

I don't know if this provides much more than OprofileUI, but the
interface is nice and it's popular in some quarters...

----

In summary, each of these tools provides a unique set of useful
capabilities that I think would be very nice to have in Yocto. There
are of course overlaps e.g. both SystemTap and trace-cmd provide
function-callgraph tracing, both trace-cmd and perf trace provide
event-subsystem-based tracing, SystemTap and perf trace scripting both
provide different ways of achieving the same kinds of high-level
aggregation goals, while blktrace, SystemTap, and perf trace scripting
all provide different ways of looking at block I/O. But they also
each have their own strengths as well, and do much more than what
they do in overlap.

At some point some of the these tools will be completely overlap each
other - for example SystemTap and/or perf trace scripting eventually
will probably do everything blktrace does, and will additionally have
the potential to show that information in a larger context e.g. along
with VFS and/or mm data sources. Making things like that happen -
adding value to those tools or providing larger contexts could be a
focus for future Yocto contributions. On the other hand, it may make
sense in v1.0 to spend a small amount of development time to actually
help provide some coherent integration to all these tools and maybe
contribute to something like perfkit (http://audidude.com/?p=504).
There may not be time to do that, but at least the minimum set of
tools for a great user experience should be available, which I think
the above list goes a long way to providing. Comments welcome...

Tom

On 10-11-12 5:25 PM, Tom Zanussi wrote:

Hi,

For the 1.0 Yocto release, we'd like to have as complete a set of
tracing and profiling tools as possible, enough so that most users will
be satisfied with what's available, but not so many as to produce a
maintenance burden.

The current set is pretty decent:

latencytop
powertop
lttng
lttng-ust
oprofile(ui)
trace-cmd
perf

but there seems to be an omission or two with respect to the current set
as packaged in Yocto, and there are a few other tools that I think would
make sense to add, either to address a gap in the current set, or
because they're popular enough to be missed by more than a couple
users:

KernelShark
perf trace scripting support
SystemTap
blktrace
sysprof

These match my lists that I've been adding to various
kernels (and roadmaps) for a while, so no arguments here.

See below for some comments and ideas.

These are just my own opinions regarding what I think is missing - see
below for more details on each tool, and some reasons I think it would
make sense to include them. If you disagree, or even better, have
suggestions for other tools that you think are essential and missing,
please let me know. Otherwise, I plan on adding support for them to
Yocto in the very near future (e.g. starting next week).

Just one note - I know that some of these may not be appropriate for all
platforms; in those cases, I'd expect they just wouldn't be included in
the images for those machines. Actually, except for sysprof and
KernelShark, they all have modes that should allow them to be used with
minimal footprints on the target system, and even then I think both
KernelShark and sysprof could both be relatively easily retrofitted with
a remote layer like OprofileUI's that would make them lightweight on the
target.

Anyway, on to some descriptions of the tools themselves, followed by a
short summary at the end...

----

Tool: KernelShark
URL: http://rostedt.homelinux.com/kernelshark/
Architectures supported: all, nothing arch-specific

KernelShark is a front-end GUI interface to trace-cmd, a tracing tool
that's already included in the Yocto SDK (trace-cmd basically provides
an easier-to-use text-based interface to the raw debugfs tracing files
contained in /sys/kernel/debug/tracing).

Tracing can be started and stopped from the GUI; when the trace session
ends, the results are displayed in a couple of sub-windows: a graphical
area that displays events for each CPU but that can also display
per-task graphs, and a listbox that displays a detailed list of events
in the trace. In addition to display of raw events, it also supports
display of the output of the kernel's ftrace plugins
(/sys/kernel/debug/tracing/available_tracers) such as the function and
function_graph tracers, which are very useful on their own for figuring
out exactly what the kernel does in particular codepaths.

One very nice KernelShark feature is the ability to easily toggle the
individual events or event subsystems of interest; specifying these
manually is usually one of the most unpleasant parts of command-line
tracing, for this reason alone KernelShark is worth looking at, as it
makes the whole tracing experience much more manageable and enjoyable
(and therefore more likely to be used). Additionally, the extensive
support of filtering and searching is very useful. The GUI itself is
also extensible via Python plug-ins. All in all a great tool for
running and viewing traces.

Support for remote targets: The event subsystem and ftrace plugins that
provide the data for trace-cmd/KernelShark are completely implemented
within the kernel; both control and trace stream data retrieval are
accessed via debugfs files. The files that provide the data retrieval
function are accessible via splice, which means that the trace streams
could be easily sent over the network and processed on the host. The
current KernelShark code doesn't do that - currently the UI needs to run
on the target - but that would be an area where Yocto could add some
value - it shouldn't be a huge amount of effort to add that capability.
In the worst case, something along the lines of what OprofileUI does
(start/stop the trace on the target, and send the results back when
done) could also be acceptable as a local stopgap solution.

Agreed, adding off-target viewing/control would be a nice
addition here. Phase (b) perhaps ?

----

Tool: perf trace scripting support
URL: none, included in the kernel sources
Architectures supported: all, nothing arch-specific

Yocto already includes the 'perf' tool, which is a userspace tool that's
actually bundled as part of the mainline linux kernel source. 'perf
trace' is a subtool of perf that performs system-wide (or per-task)
event tracing and displays the raw trace event data using format strings
associated with each trace event. In fact, the events and event
descriptions used by perf are the same as those used by
trace-cmd/KernelShark to generate its traces (the kernel event
subsystem, see /sys/kernel/debug/tracing/events).

As is the case with KernelShark, the reams of raw trace data provided by
perf trace provide a lot of useful detail, but the question becomes how
to realistically extract useful high-level information from it. You
could sit down and pore through it for trends or specific conditions (no
fun, and it's not really humanly possible with large data sets).
Filtering can be used, but that only goes so far. Realistically, to
make sense of it, it needs to be 'boiled down' somehow into a more
manageable form. The fancy word for that is 'aggregation', which
basically just means 'sticking the important stuff in a hash table'.

The perf trace scripting support embeds scripting language interpreters
into perf to allow perf's internal event dispatch mechanism to call
script handlers directly (script handlers can also call back into perf).
The scripting_ops interface formalizes this interaction and allows any
scripting engine that implements the API to be used as a full-fledged
event-processing language - currently Python and Perl are implemented.

Events are exposed in the scripting interpreter as function calls, where
each param is an event field (in the event description pseudo-file for
the event in the kernel event subsystem). During processing, every
event in the trace stream is converted into a corresponding function
call in the scripting language. At that point, the handler can do
anything it want to using the available facilities of the scripting
language such as, for example, aggregate the event data in a hash table.

A starter script with handlers for each event type can be automatically
generated from existing trace data using the 'perf trace -g' command.
This allows for one-off, quick turnaround trace experiments. But
scripts can be 'promoted' to full-fledged 'perf trace' scripts that
essentially become part of perf and can be listed using 'perf trace -l'.
This involves simply writing a couple wrapper shell scripts and putting
them in the right places.

In general, perf trace scripting is a useful tool to have when the
standard set of off-the-shelf tools aren't really enough to analyze a
problem. To take a simple example, using tools like iostat you can get
a general statistical idea of the read/write activity on the system, but
those tools won't tell you which processes are actually responsible for
most of the I/O activity. The 'perf trace rw-by-pid' canned script in
perf trace uses the system-call read/write tracepoints
(sys_enter/exit_read/write) to capture all the reads and writes (and
failed reads/writes) of every process on the system and at the end
displays a detailed per-process summary of the results. That
information can be used to determine which processes are responsible for
the most I/O activity on the system, which can in turn be used to target
and drill down into the detailed read/write activity caused by a
specific process using for example the rw-by-file canned script which
displays the per-file read/write activity for a specific process.

To give a couple more concrete examples of how this capability can be
useful, here are some other examples of things that can only be done
with scripting, such as detecting complex or 'compound' events.

Simple hard-coded filters and triggers can scan data for simple
conditions e.g. someone tried to read /etc/passwd. This kind of thing
should be possible with the current event filtering capabilities even
without scripting support e.g. scan the event stream for events that
satisfy the condition:

event == vfs_open&& filename == "/etc/passwd"

(This would tell you that someone tried to open /etc/password, but that
in itself isn't very useful - you'd really like to at least know who,
which of course could be accomplished by scripting.)

But a lot of other problems involve pattern matching over multiple
events. One example from a recent lkml posting:

The poster had noticed a certain inefficient pattern in block I/O data,
where multiple readahead requests resulted in an unnecessarily
inefficient pattern:

- queue first request
- plug queue
- queue second adjacent request
- merge
- unplug, issue, complete

In the case of readahead, latency is extremely important for throughput:
explicitly unplugging after each readahead increased throughput by 68%.
It's interesting to note that older kernels didn't have this problem,
but some unknown commit(s) introduced it.

This is the type of pattern that you would really need scripting support
in order to detect. A simple script to check for this condition and
detect a regression such as this could be quickly written and made
available, and possibly avoid the situation where a problem like this
could go undetected for a couple kernel revisions.

Perf and perf trace scripting also support 'live mode' (over the network
if desired), where the trace stream is processed as soon as it's
generated. Getting back to the "/etc/password" example - as mentioned,
something an administrator might want would be to monitor accesses to
"/etc/passwd" and see who's trying to access it. With live mode, a
continuously running script could monitor sys_open calls, compare the
opened filename against "/etc/passwd", get the uid and look up username
to find out who's trying to read it, and have the Python script e-mail
the culprit's name to the admin when detected.

Live mode is important for both the small and large targets,
so this is a good addition.

Baically, live-mode allows for long-running trace sessions that can
continuously scan for rare conditions. Referring back to the readahead
example, one assumption the poster made was that "merging of a readahead
window with anything other than its own sibling" would be extremely
rare. A long-running script could easily be written to detect this
exact condition and either confirm or refute that assumption, which
would be hard to do without some kind of scripting support.

Perf trace scripting is relatively new, so there aren't yet a lot of
real-world examples - currently there are about 15 canned scripts
available (see 'perf trace -l') including the rw-by-pid and rw-by-file
examples described above.

The main data source for perf trace scripting are the statically defined
trace events defined in /sys/kernel/debug/tracing/events. It's also
possible to use the dynamic event sources available from the 'perf
probe' tool, but this is still an area of active integration at the
moment.

Support for remote targets: perf and perf trace scripting 'live-mode'
support allows the trace stream to be piped over the network using e.g.
netcat. Using that mode, the target does nothing but generate the trace
stream and send it over the network to the host, where a live-mode
script can be applied to it. Even so, this is probably not the most
efficient way to transfer trace data - one hope would be that perf would
add support for splice, but that's uncertain at this point.

I'd also suggest that doing a canned powermanagement script would
be good here. Using the existing tracepoints (and adding our own)
to get a detailed view of C and P states would be a nice demo.

----

Tool: SystemTap
URL: http://sourceware.org/systemtap/
Architectures supported: x86, x86_64, ppc, ppc64, ia64, s390, arm

SystemTap is also a system-wide tracing tool that allows users to write
scripts that attach handlers to events and perform complex aggregation
and filtering of the event stream. It's been around for a long time and
thus has a lot of canned scripts available, which make use of a set of
general-purpose script-support libraries called 'tapsets' (see the
SystemTap wiki, off of the above link).

The language used to write SystemTap scripts isn't however a
general-purpose language like Perl or Python, but rather a C-like
language defined specifically for SystemTap. The reason for that has to
do with the way SystemTap works - SystemTap scripts are executed in the
kernel, which makes general-purpose language runtimes off-limits.
Basically what SystemTap does is translate a user script into an
equivalent C version, which is then compiled into a kernel module.
Inserting the kernel module attaches the C code to specific event
sources in the kernel - whenever an event is hit, the corresponding
event handler is invoked and does whatever it's told to do - usually
this is updating a counter in a hash table or something similar. When
the tracing session exits, the script typically calculates and displays
a summary of the aggregation(s), or whatever the user wants it to do.

In addition to the standard set of event sources (the static kernel
tracepoint events, and dynamic events via kprobes) SystemTap also
supports user space probing if the kernel is built with utrace support.
User space probing can be done either dynamically, or statically if the
application contains static tracepoints. A very interesting aspect of
this is that via dtrace-compatible markers, the existing static dtrace
tracepoints contained in, for example, the Java or Python runtimes can
also be used as event sources (e.g. if they're compiled with
--enable-dtrace). This should allow any Python or Java application to
be much more meaningfully traced and profiled using SystemTap - for
example, with complete userspace support theoretically every detail of
say an http request to a Java web application could be followed, from
the network device driver to the web server through a Java servlet and
back out through the kernel again. Supporting this however, in addition
to having utrace support in the kernel, might also require some
SystemTap-specific patches to the affected applications. Users can also
instrument their own applications using static tracepoints
(http://sourceware.org/systemtap/wiki/AddingUserSpaceProbingToApps).

As mentioned, there are a whole host of scripts available. Examples
include everything from per-process network traffic monitoring,
packet-drop monitoring, per-process disk I/O times, to the same types of
applications described above for 'perf trace scripting). There are too
many to usefully cover here, see
http://sourceware.org/systemtap/examples/keyword-index.html for a
complete list of the available scripts. Everything in SystemTap is also
very well documented - there are tutorials, handbooks, and a bunch of
useful information on the wiki such as 'War Stories' and deep-dives into
other use cases i.e. there's no shortage of useful info for new (and
old) users. I won't cover any specific examples here - basically all of
the motivations and capabilities described above for 'perf trace
scripting' should apply equally well to SystemTap, and won't be repeated
here.

Support for remote targets: SystemTap supports a cross-instrumentation
mode, where only the SystemTap run-time needs to be available on the
target. The instrumentation kernel module derived from a myscript.stp
generated on host (stap -r kernel_version myscript.stp -m module_name)
is copied over to target and executed via staprun 'myscript.ko'.

However, apparently host and target must still be the same architecture
for this to work.

Systemtap is the lowest on my list of items to add. Nothing
against systemtap, but the in kernel and architecture bindings
have always been problematic in an embedded scenario and I've
rarely (never) gotten a strong request for it.

----

Tool: blktrace
URL: http://linux.die.net/man/8/blktrace
Architectures supported: all, nothing arch-specific

Still the best way to get detailed disk I/O traces, and you can do some
really cool things with it:

http://feedblog.org/2010/04/27/2009/

Support for remote targets: Uses splice/sendfile, so the target can if
it wants do nothing but generate the trace data and send it over the
network. blkparse, the data collection portion of blktrace, fully
supports this mode and in fact encourages it in order to avoid
perturbing the results that occur when writing trace data on the target.

----

Tool: sysprof
URL: http://www.daimi.au.dk/~sandmann/sysprof/
Architectures supported: all, nothing arch-specific

A nice simple system-wide profiling UI - it profiles the kernel and all
running userspace applications. It displays functions in one window, and
an expandable tree of callees for the selected function in the the other
window, all with hit stats. Clicking on a callee in the callee window
shows callers of that function in a third window.

I don't know if this provides much more than OprofileUI, but the
interface is nice and it's popular in some quarters...

I think it is worth adding.

----

In summary, each of these tools provides a unique set of useful
capabilities that I think would be very nice to have in Yocto. There
are of course overlaps e.g. both SystemTap and trace-cmd provide
function-callgraph tracing, both trace-cmd and perf trace provide
event-subsystem-based tracing, SystemTap and perf trace scripting both
provide different ways of achieving the same kinds of high-level
aggregation goals, while blktrace, SystemTap, and perf trace scripting
all provide different ways of looking at block I/O. But they also each
have their own strengths as well, and do much more than what they do in
overlap.

That's ok. perf collides with oprofile, and everything else, so
overlap is no big issue, as long as we control the options and
can make them all co-exist in the kernel.

At some point some of the these tools will be completely overlap each
other - for example SystemTap and/or perf trace scripting eventually
will probably do everything blktrace does, and will additionally have
the potential to show that information in a larger context e.g. along
with VFS and/or mm data sources. Making things like that happen -
adding value to those tools or providing larger contexts could be a
focus for future Yocto contributions. On the other hand, it may make
sense in v1.0 to spend a small amount of development time to actually
help provide some coherent integration to all these tools and maybe
contribute to something like perfkit (http://audidude.com/?p=504).
There may not be time to do that, but at least the minimum set of tools
for a great user experience should be available, which I think the above
list goes a long way to providing. Comments welcome...

I've also had pings in the past about:

tuna and oscillscope: http://www.osadl.org/Single-View.111+M52212cb1379.0.html, but they are more 'tuning',
and I haven't checked activity on them for a while.

Although not a toolkit/tracing/profiling, having either
a nice how to, or light way to use dynamic tracepoints
with kprobes is a good idea. Plenty of things that we can
do to contribute here as well.

Ensuring that all these work with KGDB/KDB is also key,
since regressions sneak in pretty easily. Debug and trace
are getting closer and should be considered together. In
that same spirit better kexec/kdump/ftrace_dumo_on_oops
testing helps debug/tracing/profiling in the degenerate case.

And finally, having a good story around boottime tracing
and optimization is a key usecase for any of these tools.

We should do a ranking of the complete list (once compiled)
and see what can or can't be done .. since there IS quite a
bit of it here :)

Cheers,

Bruce

Tom



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Comments below...

On Fri, 2010-11-12 at 17:02 -0800, Bruce Ashfield wrote:

On 10-11-12 5:25 PM, Tom Zanussi wrote:

Hi,

For the 1.0 Yocto release, we'd like to have as complete a set of
tracing and profiling tools as possible, enough so that most users will
be satisfied with what's available, but not so many as to produce a
maintenance burden.

The current set is pretty decent:

latencytop
powertop
lttng
lttng-ust
oprofile(ui)
trace-cmd
perf

but there seems to be an omission or two with respect to the current set
as packaged in Yocto, and there are a few other tools that I think would
make sense to add, either to address a gap in the current set, or
because they're popular enough to be missed by more than a couple
users:

KernelShark
perf trace scripting support
SystemTap
blktrace
sysprof

These match my lists that I've been adding to various
kernels (and roadmaps) for a while, so no arguments here.

See below for some comments and ideas.

These are just my own opinions regarding what I think is missing - see
below for more details on each tool, and some reasons I think it would
make sense to include them. If you disagree, or even better, have
suggestions for other tools that you think are essential and missing,
please let me know. Otherwise, I plan on adding support for them to
Yocto in the very near future (e.g. starting next week).

Just one note - I know that some of these may not be appropriate for all
platforms; in those cases, I'd expect they just wouldn't be included in
the images for those machines. Actually, except for sysprof and
KernelShark, they all have modes that should allow them to be used with
minimal footprints on the target system, and even then I think both
KernelShark and sysprof could both be relatively easily retrofitted with
a remote layer like OprofileUI's that would make them lightweight on the
target.

Anyway, on to some descriptions of the tools themselves, followed by a
short summary at the end...

----

Tool: KernelShark
URL: http://rostedt.homelinux.com/kernelshark/
Architectures supported: all, nothing arch-specific

KernelShark is a front-end GUI interface to trace-cmd, a tracing tool
that's already included in the Yocto SDK (trace-cmd basically provides
an easier-to-use text-based interface to the raw debugfs tracing files
contained in /sys/kernel/debug/tracing).

Tracing can be started and stopped from the GUI; when the trace session
ends, the results are displayed in a couple of sub-windows: a graphical
area that displays events for each CPU but that can also display
per-task graphs, and a listbox that displays a detailed list of events
in the trace. In addition to display of raw events, it also supports
display of the output of the kernel's ftrace plugins
(/sys/kernel/debug/tracing/available_tracers) such as the function and
function_graph tracers, which are very useful on their own for figuring
out exactly what the kernel does in particular codepaths.

One very nice KernelShark feature is the ability to easily toggle the
individual events or event subsystems of interest; specifying these
manually is usually one of the most unpleasant parts of command-line
tracing, for this reason alone KernelShark is worth looking at, as it
makes the whole tracing experience much more manageable and enjoyable
(and therefore more likely to be used). Additionally, the extensive
support of filtering and searching is very useful. The GUI itself is
also extensible via Python plug-ins. All in all a great tool for
running and viewing traces.

Support for remote targets: The event subsystem and ftrace plugins that
provide the data for trace-cmd/KernelShark are completely implemented
within the kernel; both control and trace stream data retrieval are
accessed via debugfs files. The files that provide the data retrieval
function are accessible via splice, which means that the trace streams
could be easily sent over the network and processed on the host. The
current KernelShark code doesn't do that - currently the UI needs to run
on the target - but that would be an area where Yocto could add some
value - it shouldn't be a huge amount of effort to add that capability.
In the worst case, something along the lines of what OprofileUI does
(start/stop the trace on the target, and send the results back when
done) could also be acceptable as a local stopgap solution.

Agreed, adding off-target viewing/control would be a nice
addition here. Phase (b) perhaps ?

Yeah, I agree - we probably don't have time to do it now...

----

Tool: perf trace scripting support
URL: none, included in the kernel sources
Architectures supported: all, nothing arch-specific

Yocto already includes the 'perf' tool, which is a userspace tool that's
actually bundled as part of the mainline linux kernel source. 'perf
trace' is a subtool of perf that performs system-wide (or per-task)
event tracing and displays the raw trace event data using format strings
associated with each trace event. In fact, the events and event
descriptions used by perf are the same as those used by
trace-cmd/KernelShark to generate its traces (the kernel event
subsystem, see /sys/kernel/debug/tracing/events).

As is the case with KernelShark, the reams of raw trace data provided by
perf trace provide a lot of useful detail, but the question becomes how
to realistically extract useful high-level information from it. You
could sit down and pore through it for trends or specific conditions (no
fun, and it's not really humanly possible with large data sets).
Filtering can be used, but that only goes so far. Realistically, to
make sense of it, it needs to be 'boiled down' somehow into a more
manageable form. The fancy word for that is 'aggregation', which
basically just means 'sticking the important stuff in a hash table'.

The perf trace scripting support embeds scripting language interpreters
into perf to allow perf's internal event dispatch mechanism to call
script handlers directly (script handlers can also call back into perf).
The scripting_ops interface formalizes this interaction and allows any
scripting engine that implements the API to be used as a full-fledged
event-processing language - currently Python and Perl are implemented.

Events are exposed in the scripting interpreter as function calls, where
each param is an event field (in the event description pseudo-file for
the event in the kernel event subsystem). During processing, every
event in the trace stream is converted into a corresponding function
call in the scripting language. At that point, the handler can do
anything it want to using the available facilities of the scripting
language such as, for example, aggregate the event data in a hash table.

A starter script with handlers for each event type can be automatically
generated from existing trace data using the 'perf trace -g' command.
This allows for one-off, quick turnaround trace experiments. But
scripts can be 'promoted' to full-fledged 'perf trace' scripts that
essentially become part of perf and can be listed using 'perf trace -l'.
This involves simply writing a couple wrapper shell scripts and putting
them in the right places.

In general, perf trace scripting is a useful tool to have when the
standard set of off-the-shelf tools aren't really enough to analyze a
problem. To take a simple example, using tools like iostat you can get
a general statistical idea of the read/write activity on the system, but
those tools won't tell you which processes are actually responsible for
most of the I/O activity. The 'perf trace rw-by-pid' canned script in
perf trace uses the system-call read/write tracepoints
(sys_enter/exit_read/write) to capture all the reads and writes (and
failed reads/writes) of every process on the system and at the end
displays a detailed per-process summary of the results. That
information can be used to determine which processes are responsible for
the most I/O activity on the system, which can in turn be used to target
and drill down into the detailed read/write activity caused by a
specific process using for example the rw-by-file canned script which
displays the per-file read/write activity for a specific process.

To give a couple more concrete examples of how this capability can be
useful, here are some other examples of things that can only be done
with scripting, such as detecting complex or 'compound' events.

Simple hard-coded filters and triggers can scan data for simple
conditions e.g. someone tried to read /etc/passwd. This kind of thing
should be possible with the current event filtering capabilities even
without scripting support e.g. scan the event stream for events that
satisfy the condition:

event == vfs_open&& filename == "/etc/passwd"

(This would tell you that someone tried to open /etc/password, but that
in itself isn't very useful - you'd really like to at least know who,
which of course could be accomplished by scripting.)

But a lot of other problems involve pattern matching over multiple
events. One example from a recent lkml posting:

The poster had noticed a certain inefficient pattern in block I/O data,
where multiple readahead requests resulted in an unnecessarily
inefficient pattern:

- queue first request
- plug queue
- queue second adjacent request
- merge
- unplug, issue, complete

In the case of readahead, latency is extremely important for throughput:
explicitly unplugging after each readahead increased throughput by 68%.
It's interesting to note that older kernels didn't have this problem,
but some unknown commit(s) introduced it.

This is the type of pattern that you would really need scripting support
in order to detect. A simple script to check for this condition and
detect a regression such as this could be quickly written and made
available, and possibly avoid the situation where a problem like this
could go undetected for a couple kernel revisions.

Perf and perf trace scripting also support 'live mode' (over the network
if desired), where the trace stream is processed as soon as it's
generated. Getting back to the "/etc/password" example - as mentioned,
something an administrator might want would be to monitor accesses to
"/etc/passwd" and see who's trying to access it. With live mode, a
continuously running script could monitor sys_open calls, compare the
opened filename against "/etc/passwd", get the uid and look up username
to find out who's trying to read it, and have the Python script e-mail
the culprit's name to the admin when detected.

Live mode is important for both the small and large targets,
so this is a good addition.

Baically, live-mode allows for long-running trace sessions that can
continuously scan for rare conditions. Referring back to the readahead
example, one assumption the poster made was that "merging of a readahead
window with anything other than its own sibling" would be extremely
rare. A long-running script could easily be written to detect this
exact condition and either confirm or refute that assumption, which
would be hard to do without some kind of scripting support.

Perf trace scripting is relatively new, so there aren't yet a lot of
real-world examples - currently there are about 15 canned scripts
available (see 'perf trace -l') including the rw-by-pid and rw-by-file
examples described above.

The main data source for perf trace scripting are the statically defined
trace events defined in /sys/kernel/debug/tracing/events. It's also
possible to use the dynamic event sources available from the 'perf
probe' tool, but this is still an area of active integration at the
moment.

Support for remote targets: perf and perf trace scripting 'live-mode'
support allows the trace stream to be piped over the network using e.g.
netcat. Using that mode, the target does nothing but generate the trace
stream and send it over the network to the host, where a live-mode
script can be applied to it. Even so, this is probably not the most
efficient way to transfer trace data - one hope would be that perf would
add support for splice, but that's uncertain at this point.

I'd also suggest that doing a canned powermanagement script would
be good here. Using the existing tracepoints (and adding our own)
to get a detailed view of C and P states would be a nice demo.

Makes sense, and shouldn't be too much work, but still - phase (b) too?

----

Tool: SystemTap
URL: http://sourceware.org/systemtap/
Architectures supported: x86, x86_64, ppc, ppc64, ia64, s390, arm

SystemTap is also a system-wide tracing tool that allows users to write
scripts that attach handlers to events and perform complex aggregation
and filtering of the event stream. It's been around for a long time and
thus has a lot of canned scripts available, which make use of a set of
general-purpose script-support libraries called 'tapsets' (see the
SystemTap wiki, off of the above link).

The language used to write SystemTap scripts isn't however a
general-purpose language like Perl or Python, but rather a C-like
language defined specifically for SystemTap. The reason for that has to
do with the way SystemTap works - SystemTap scripts are executed in the
kernel, which makes general-purpose language runtimes off-limits.
Basically what SystemTap does is translate a user script into an
equivalent C version, which is then compiled into a kernel module.
Inserting the kernel module attaches the C code to specific event
sources in the kernel - whenever an event is hit, the corresponding
event handler is invoked and does whatever it's told to do - usually
this is updating a counter in a hash table or something similar. When
the tracing session exits, the script typically calculates and displays
a summary of the aggregation(s), or whatever the user wants it to do.

In addition to the standard set of event sources (the static kernel
tracepoint events, and dynamic events via kprobes) SystemTap also
supports user space probing if the kernel is built with utrace support.
User space probing can be done either dynamically, or statically if the
application contains static tracepoints. A very interesting aspect of
this is that via dtrace-compatible markers, the existing static dtrace
tracepoints contained in, for example, the Java or Python runtimes can
also be used as event sources (e.g. if they're compiled with
--enable-dtrace). This should allow any Python or Java application to
be much more meaningfully traced and profiled using SystemTap - for
example, with complete userspace support theoretically every detail of
say an http request to a Java web application could be followed, from
the network device driver to the web server through a Java servlet and
back out through the kernel again. Supporting this however, in addition
to having utrace support in the kernel, might also require some
SystemTap-specific patches to the affected applications. Users can also
instrument their own applications using static tracepoints
(http://sourceware.org/systemtap/wiki/AddingUserSpaceProbingToApps).

As mentioned, there are a whole host of scripts available. Examples
include everything from per-process network traffic monitoring,
packet-drop monitoring, per-process disk I/O times, to the same types of
applications described above for 'perf trace scripting). There are too
many to usefully cover here, see
http://sourceware.org/systemtap/examples/keyword-index.html for a
complete list of the available scripts. Everything in SystemTap is also
very well documented - there are tutorials, handbooks, and a bunch of
useful information on the wiki such as 'War Stories' and deep-dives into
other use cases i.e. there's no shortage of useful info for new (and
old) users. I won't cover any specific examples here - basically all of
the motivations and capabilities described above for 'perf trace
scripting' should apply equally well to SystemTap, and won't be repeated
here.

Support for remote targets: SystemTap supports a cross-instrumentation
mode, where only the SystemTap run-time needs to be available on the
target. The instrumentation kernel module derived from a myscript.stp
generated on host (stap -r kernel_version myscript.stp -m module_name)
is copied over to target and executed via staprun 'myscript.ko'.

However, apparently host and target must still be the same architecture
for this to work.

Systemtap is the lowest on my list of items to add. Nothing
against systemtap, but the in kernel and architecture bindings
have always been problematic in an embedded scenario and I've
rarely (never) gotten a strong request for it.

Yeah, I'm kind of afraid of what could turn up once we get to the nuts
and bolts of integrating this. Still, I think it would be worth the
effort.

----

Tool: blktrace
URL: http://linux.die.net/man/8/blktrace
Architectures supported: all, nothing arch-specific

Still the best way to get detailed disk I/O traces, and you can do some
really cool things with it:

http://feedblog.org/2010/04/27/2009/

Support for remote targets: Uses splice/sendfile, so the target can if
it wants do nothing but generate the trace data and send it over the
network. blkparse, the data collection portion of blktrace, fully
supports this mode and in fact encourages it in order to avoid
perturbing the results that occur when writing trace data on the target.

----

Tool: sysprof
URL: http://www.daimi.au.dk/~sandmann/sysprof/
Architectures supported: all, nothing arch-specific

A nice simple system-wide profiling UI - it profiles the kernel and all
running userspace applications. It displays functions in one window, and
an expandable tree of callees for the selected function in the the other
window, all with hit stats. Clicking on a callee in the callee window
shows callers of that function in a third window.

I don't know if this provides much more than OprofileUI, but the
interface is nice and it's popular in some quarters...

I think it is worth adding.

----

In summary, each of these tools provides a unique set of useful
capabilities that I think would be very nice to have in Yocto. There
are of course overlaps e.g. both SystemTap and trace-cmd provide
function-callgraph tracing, both trace-cmd and perf trace provide
event-subsystem-based tracing, SystemTap and perf trace scripting both
provide different ways of achieving the same kinds of high-level
aggregation goals, while blktrace, SystemTap, and perf trace scripting
all provide different ways of looking at block I/O. But they also each
have their own strengths as well, and do much more than what they do in
overlap.

That's ok. perf collides with oprofile, and everything else, so
overlap is no big issue, as long as we control the options and
can make them all co-exist in the kernel.

At some point some of the these tools will be completely overlap each
other - for example SystemTap and/or perf trace scripting eventually
will probably do everything blktrace does, and will additionally have
the potential to show that information in a larger context e.g. along
with VFS and/or mm data sources. Making things like that happen -
adding value to those tools or providing larger contexts could be a
focus for future Yocto contributions. On the other hand, it may make
sense in v1.0 to spend a small amount of development time to actually
help provide some coherent integration to all these tools and maybe
contribute to something like perfkit (http://audidude.com/?p=504).
There may not be time to do that, but at least the minimum set of tools
for a great user experience should be available, which I think the above
list goes a long way to providing. Comments welcome...

I've also had pings in the past about:

tuna and oscillscope:
http://www.osadl.org/Single-View.111+M52212cb1379.0.html, but they are
more 'tuning',
and I haven't checked activity on them for a while.

Those look like great tools too - they should go in.

Although not a toolkit/tracing/profiling, having either
a nice how to, or light way to use dynamic tracepoints
with kprobes is a good idea. Plenty of things that we can
do to contribute here as well.

I agree - and I think it would be nice to have a section in the wiki
dedicated to using all the tools we bundle...

As for raw kprobes/jprobes, there seem to be a few nice articles on
kprobes/jprobes from the IBM and Redhat guys, but they may be a little
outdated. There are also the examples in the kernel source /samples and
a detailed doc in /Documentation.. But yeah, we should probably have
our own up-to-date and Yocto-specific docs covering this (and other)
topics.

Ensuring that all these work with KGDB/KDB is also key,
since regressions sneak in pretty easily. Debug and trace
are getting closer and should be considered together. In
that same spirit better kexec/kdump/ftrace_dumo_on_oops
testing helps debug/tracing/profiling in the degenerate case.

And finally, having a good story around boottime tracing
and optimization is a key usecase for any of these tools.

We should do a ranking of the complete list (once compiled)
and see what can or can't be done .. since there IS quite a
bit of it here :)

Definitely, we need to do that, regardless of how much of it we can get
in initially - it's unlikely a lot of it will, since there's only a week
in the schedule for it, but if there's extra time at the end...

Thanks,

Tom

Cheers,

Bruce

Tom



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