[lttng-dev] lttng questions

[Philippe Proulx]

On Sun, Jul 16, 2017 at 2:28 PM, Nalin Pai <nalinpai at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> We are looking at using lttng as a solution for all our trace and debug requirements. We want to get away from traditional file based string format logging and move to lttng, which then gives us the flexibility of dumping the traces to file or the network. With this background, I have several questions for the team.
>
> 1) CTF supports struct fields. I don’t see any ctf_ macros in lttng that will allow us to define tracepoints having struct fields. Is there a way to do this that I am missing?

Complex CTF types (except a few very specific exceptions) are not
supported in LTTng-UST, the user space LTTng tracer. If you need a
structure data type, then you need to "explode" it, perhaps with field
name prefixes, as of the latest version of LTTng. For example:
`my_struct_user_id`, `my_struct_msg_id`, `my_struct_msg`.

>
> 2) Display hints. Sometimes there is a need to display certain fields in a particular way, e.g. IP and MAC addresses. While the tracepoint definition for these fields are going to be integers or sequences of integers, we would like babeltrace to display these fields in a certain format. Short of modifying babeltrace to recognize these fields by their names and handle them specially, is there any other way of achieving the same?

In the short- to medium-term, with Babeltrace 2.0 (currently in "pre"
development stage), you can create your own sink component to do
something with events. The default textual display is called
sink.text.pretty. If you need a modified version of this sink
component class, you could copy its source and create your own
modified plugin which, as you wrote, would recognize the fields by
name, etc. You could then run the CLI as such:

    babeltrace /path/to/trace --component=sink.my-plugin.my-component-class

I can't comment on Trace Compass/LTTng Scope.

I see no other way for the moment. CTF 2 will have a way to indicate
that specific fields are to be displayed using a given format string,
for example, but its specification is not available currently (only a
proposal is available here
<http://diamon.org/ctf/files/CTF2-PROP-1.0.html>). Babeltrace 2.1 will
support CTF 2, after which a future version of LTTng will produce it.

Phil

>
> -Nalin
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> lttng-dev mailing list
> lttng-dev at lists.lttng.org
> https://lists.lttng.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/lttng-dev
>