GSOC 2015: Run Time Tracing

[Richa Sehgal]

Dear Chris,

Thanks for the detailed reply. This is indeed a very useful project.

I went through all the provided resources, read about CTF format, LTTng,
Babletrace, Trace Linker, etc. I have formed a rough picture in my head
about the things to do. Trace Linker is a tracing tool and its integration
in the capture engine engine would let us capture the traces. The
configuration files would store what all functions to trace and how to
output them (their ids, etc). On a very high level, the traces generated
would need to be converted to CTF format by Babletrace which can then be
ingested by tools like Trace Compass.

Am I right? Can you provide me with the next steps? Its a very interesting
project with a lot to learn and contribute, and I want to get a deeper
understanding of the same.

Thanks
Richa

On Fri, Mar 13, 2015 at 6:29 PM, Chris Johns <chrisj at rtems.org> wrote:

> On 11/03/2015 4:17 am, Richa Sehgal wrote:
>
>>
>> I am Richa Sehgal currently pursuing Master’s at University of Illinois
>> Urbana Champaign, USA. I did my undergraduate from Indian Institute of
>> Technology Delhi (IIT-Delhi).
>>
>> I am interested in contributing to the Run Time Tracing project in GSOC
>> 2015.
>>
>
> Thank for your interest.
>
>
>> I went through the project details on:
>> https://devel.rtems.org/wiki/Developer/Projects/Open/TraceTool.
>>
>> It mentions the work done in past by 2 GSOC students in 2008 and 2009.
>> Further, it says to contact the community, in particular Chris Johns
>> about the next logical step. This mail is regarding the same. I am very
>> keen on contributing my ideas to this project. It would be great if the
>> you can guide me on how I can begin with this project and what all do we
>> have to implement. My IRC username is richashi.
>>
>>
> The project has evolved since the last GSoC work and I will update this
> page.
>
> We have a University student working on the project at the moment and I
> welcome the GSoC effort to the project as well. There is plenty to do.
>
> The major change is the desire to output CTF format data. This lets us use
> tools such as Trace Compass (https://www.polarsys.org/
> solutions/tracecompass) to help visualise the output. Joel has recently
> met up with the LTTng team and this followed a meeting Joel and I had with
> them at the last GSoC Mentors summit. They are aware of our efforts which
> is nice.
>
> The other major piece of work that now exists is the Trace Linker in the
> RTEMS Tool Project (https://git.rtems.org/rtems-tools). The trace linker
> is a symbol wrapping post link process that lets us inject code at the
> function call level to capture input and output values or even state
> information. There is a printk example which has proved useful for my work.
>
> Further Jennifer has updated the capture engine to work in SMP
> environments.
>
> The tasks remaining are to bring together each of these parts so we can
> generate a CTF file existing visualisation tools can display.
>
> 1. Integrate the trace linker to the capture engine.
> 2. Add enable and trigger configuration to the trace linker.
> 3. Extract capture engine logs from a target using gdb and python.
> 4. Generate command files for Babletrace from the trace linker.
> 5. Extend or use Babletrace to accept the capture engine output.
> 6. Generate function signatures by integrating libdwarf to the
> rtemstoolkit.
>
> As we already have an existing person working on this code base we will
> need to work as a team and this adds a little extra overhead to the GSoC
> students and the mentors. We will need a suitable github repo of the
> rtems-tool we can all push commits to and I can then upstream into the
> RTEMS master repo. We will also need to define the various interfaces
> between the different parts so they can be worked on.
>
> Chris
>
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