Linux Trace Toolkit: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 01:18, 8 November 2006

Revision as of 01:20, 8 November 2006

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The Linux Trace Toolkit (LTT) is a set of tools that is designed to log program execution details from a patched Linux kernel and then peformperform various analyses on them, using console-based and graphical tools. LTT allows the user to see in-depth information about the processes that were running during the trace period, including when context switches occurred, how long the processes were blocked for, and how much time the processes spent executing vs. how much time the processes were blocked. The data is logged to a text file and various console-based and graphical (GTK+) tools are provided for interpreting that data.

In order to do data collection, LTT requires a patched Linux kernel. The authors of LTT claim that the performance hit for a patched kernel compared to a regular kernel is minimal; Their testing has reportedly shown that this is less than 2.5% on a "normal use" system (measured using batches of kernel makes) and less than 5% on a file I/O intensive system (measured using batches of tar).