Interoperability Between Tracing Tools with the Common Trace Format (CTF)

This presentation introduces new technologies and a common format allowing tracing of Linux systems at the software (hypervisor, kernel, user-space), and hardware levels. One major building block of CTF is the Trace Stream Description Language (TSDL) which flexibility enables description of various binary trace stream layouts. It enables tracing of Linux deployed on multi-core CPUs, interacting with DSPs, where each of these components exports its own trace streams. This presentation covers work on the the Common Trace Format (CTF) specification and its reference implementations: the Babeltrace trace converter, the LTTng 2.0 kernel tracer, and the LTTng-UST 2.0 (user-space tracer). This work has been realized in collaboration with Ericsson, the Multi-Core Association Tool Infrastructure Workgroup and the Linux Foundation Consumer Electronics Linux Forum (CELF) Workgroup.

Mathieu Desnoyers main contributions are in the area of tracing (monitoring/performance analysis/debugging) and scalability, both at the kernel and user-space levels. He is maintainer of the LTTng project and the Userspace RCU library. He works in close collaboration with the telecommunication industry, many Linux distributions, and with customers developing hardware scaling from small embedded devices to large-deployment servers. He is CEO and Senior Software Architect at EfficiOS.