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[linuxtools-dev] Integration of GDB Tracepoints in Linux Tools

Hello Linux Toolers,

This is to announce that we would like to contribute another tracing tool integration, GDBTrace, to the Linux Tools "suite". We aim at delivering this in time for Indigo.

GDB tracepoints provide low-overhead tracing for C/C++ applications. It might work for other languages, but I'm not aware of it. In a nutshell, you instrument your code, and then start it, control it and analyze the saved data with the help of the GDB front-end. See http://sourceware.org/gdb/onlinedocs/gdb/Tracepoints.html#Tracepoints for more info. As a bonus, the LTTng UST (User Space Tracing) can be made to work with GDB.

The Eclipse integration we are working on is based on CDT 7.0.1 and GDB 7.2 and re-uses parts of the LTTng-TMF and the DSF-GDB components. The DSF-GDB component, which wraps the GDB front-end, has already been contributed to CDT by my colleague Marc Khouzam (3 offices down the hall :-). One of our goals is inter-operability between the GDBTrace views and the CDT Debug views. Thanks to DSF, that shouldn't be too hard (famous last words).

While we're at it, we would like to split the TMF (Tracing and Monitoring Framework) from the LTTng project and make it a Linux Tools framework component of its own. This component is already used by a number of internal tools and it doesn't make much sense to keep it within LTTng as new tracing tools start to be integrated. The only concern we have is that the TMF acronym is already taken within Eclipse (for EMP's Textual Modeling Framework) but I don't think that it is a big issue and there are other examples of overloaded 3-letters acronyms.

BTW, Alex K. also suggested that it might be a good idea to consider an integration of the tracing framework and the profiling framework (already in Linux Tools). I think that it is certainly worth at least an investigation but I don't really have time to do this. Anybody interested?

So, in conclusion, we would like to:
- Create a new tracing project - GDBTrace
- Carve out TMF from the current LTTng component and make it a project on its own

If this is OK with everyone, I would like to start the integration and re-factoring in a couple of weeks or so (with the help and guidance of our valliant teams leads).

Best Regards,

--
Francois

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