[lttng-dev] LTTng project development activities November 2013

[Alexandre Montplaisir]

Thanks for the update Christian!

Allow me to give a small update on the TMF (Tracing and Monitoring
Framework, a.k.a. Eclipse trace viewer) front, most of which I did talk
about in my presentation at LinuxCon.


Recent features merged in git:
- Stand-alone RCP version!
  This means it's now possible to download an architecture-dependant
build of the application that does not depend on Eclipse at all (only
needs a Java runtime). Users only interested in viewing traces, and not
in the whole Eclipse IDE integration, will probably prefer this version.
 
  Builds are available at http://lttng.org/eclipse, and are updated
semi-regularly.

- Callstack View support for UST traces
  Any UST trace taken with liblttng-ust-cyg-profile events will now
populate the Callstack View. This means you can now get the full
callstack for any application for which you have the source code!
 
  Screenshot:
  http://secretaire.dorsal.polymtl.ca/~alexmont/pics/callstackview.png
  (The binary with debugging symbols is required to get the function names.)

- Trace synchronization infrastructure
  The infrastructure is now in place to implement trace synchronization.
For example, synchronizing kernel traces from different machines, or for
synchronizing host+VM traces. Thanks to Benjamin Poirier, Masoume
Jabbarifar and Geneviève Bastien for their work on this feature!

- Index on disk
  The viewer's index is now saved to disk, instead of being kept in
memory. This means reopening an already-indexed trace should now be much
faster.


A taste of things to come:
http://secretaire.dorsal.polymtl.ca/~alexmont/pics/TMF-teaser-oct-2013.png

- CPU usage view, based on kernel events
- Memory allocation graph, using malloc events from
liblttng-ust-libc-wrapper
- Support for dynamically-loaded libraries in the UST Callstack. With
function names all the way down!