CTF Trace - Metadata template

[Riccardo-Maffei]

Good Afternoon,

I am trying to parse a CTF trace with Trace Compass. I have saved both the metadata and trace files in a directory and imported it by using the Project Explorer. I did obtain a visualization of my data, but I can't seem to get it to populate the control flow view.

Expected:

Actual:

Although this is probably caused by the timestamps having all the same value, i was still hoping for a depiction of the idle time.

I am now trying to understand why the "blocks" of events are generated together and at a constant interval of .510 seconds. In the meantime, may I ask if Trace Compass has certain requirements for the CTF metadata? Is there a metadata-template to follow or should the tool be able to correctly depict the events regardless of how their fields are named / ordered?

Thank you very much for your time

[bhufmann]

I am now trying to understand why the "blocks" of events are generated together and at a constant interval of .510 seconds. In the meantime, may I ask if Trace Compass has certain requirements for the CTF metadata? Is there a metadata-template to follow or should the tool be able to correctly depict the events regardless of how their fields are named / ordered?

The Control Flow View is specific to Linux Kernel traces, e.g. LTTng, FTrace or Perf (converted to CTF). It requires certain trace events and fields to be able to populate it.

If your trace content can be mapped to those Linux Kernel events and fields, then you could implement a Trace Compass plug-in extension that implements IKernelTrace. You will have to provide a so called IKernelAnalysisEventLayout to map your trace events to the required format. This is done when post processing the trace file in Trace Compass.

This would need to be done in as a plug-in extension in Java and installed on top of the Trace Compass application. See Trace Compass developer guide for more details on writing a plug-in extension: https://archive.eclipse.org/tracecompass/doc/stable/org.eclipse.tracecompass.doc.dev/Developer-Guide.html
Note: Browse the source code for IKernelTrace and IKernelAnalysisEventLayout and how it's used.

Alternatively, you could create such view from scratch a plug-in extension. Trace Compass has a lot of APIs to help with that. See the developer guide above for this as well.

If don't want to write Java code, you could use the data-driven analysis and view capabilities of Trace Compass. You can define the state machine in XML and define the view mapping in XML as well. This will populate such view. Here is some documentation:
https://archive.eclipse.org/tracecompass/doc/stable/org.eclipse.tracecompass.doc.user/Data-driven-analysis.html#Data_driven_analysis

Lastly, you could use EASE scripting to create such view. Here is a tutorial on how to do that:
https://github.com/dorsal-lab/Tracevizlab/tree/master/labs/204-scripted-analysis-for-custom-instrumentation

[Riccardo-Maffei]

Understood, thank you very much for the quick response!

[bhufmann]

Here some other interesting approach that we just came across where a trace is converted to LTTng-like CTF content. Not sure if that would work for you as well:

https://github.com/jonlamb-gh/trace-recorder-to-ctf