Looks very interesting, particularly for debugging interactions among
groups of demons and/or the kernel. I've had a quick look at your
screen shots and the patch and the following things came to my mind:
- analysis looks a little cryptic and crowded. If you allocate more
vertical space per process, you can stack information vertically,
avoiding overlaps.
- the information available should really be similar to what strace
has. If your process is always just reading messages, then sending
a few, you really want to know what's inside of them. Manually
combining trace information obtained from multiple sources is tricky
and error-prone.
- I like the idea of tracing bottom half handlers; now it should also
trace interrupts
- you should be able to turn off part or all of the traceing at
compile time, such that you can use the same source tree for normal
kernels.
- there should be a means for user processes to explicitly add data to
the trace (this can be trivial, without any extra system calls or
such: create a symlink /dev/tracer -> /dev/null; let process open it
and write user data to it; in trace analysis, you catch "/dev/tracer"
and label it as user data)
I haven't looked at it in detail, but do you also have text output ?
Sometimes you really want to run a few scripts over traces before they
become even remotely useful ...
Looks like a nice tool with a lot of potential.
- Werner
-- _________________________________________________________________________ / Werner Almesberger, ICA, EPFL, CH werner.almesberger@ica.epfl.ch / /_IN_R_131__Tel_+41_21_693_6621__Fax_+41_21_693_6610_____________________/- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/