Linux Tools Project - LTTng Integration

LTTng is a tracer for Linux that has the capability to generate a high volume of traces (from the kernel or an application) with very low overhead. This is achieved by instrumenting the Linux kernel and using debugfs, an efficient and lightweight virtual file system for debugging information. LTTng is delivered as a set of kernel patches, to collect the traces, as well as a tool chain to control, view and analyze the generated data.

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

The project will be delivered in two components:

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

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

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

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

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

Current Status

The first internal release (v0.1.0, delivered October/14) implements the following features:

LTTng perspective

• Project View
• Time Frame View
• Events View
• Control Flow View
• Resource View
• Statistics View
• View Synchronization

LTTng structure

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

Tracing and Monitoring Framework

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

Limitations

• Single LTTng trace support

Future Plans

V0.2.0 (due in December) should include the following:

• LTTng Control (remote and local)
• Histogram View
• Parser Generator Wizard
• Performance improvements
• Bug fixes

V0.3.0 (due TBD) should include the following:

• TBD
• Performance improvements
• Bug fixes

V1.0.0 (2010 Q2) should include the following:

• Performance improvements
• Bug fixes

Screenshots

LTTng Perspective

Video Demo

Coming (not so) soon.

Try it out

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

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

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

Note that this currently only works for Linux.

Downloading LTTng and TMF plugins

You can checkout the project plugins out of SVN from eclipse.org at svn://dev.eclipse.org/svnroot/technology/org.eclipse.linuxtools. You will need the following plugins under lttng/trunk:

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

Downloading and installing the LTTng parser library

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

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

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

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

Sample LTTng traces

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