Eclipse Trace Compass 3.0.0 Release Review

Type
Release
State
Successful
End Date of the Review Period

Reviews run for a minimum of one week. The outcome of the review is decided on this date. This is the last day to make comments or ask questions about this review.

Release

3.0.0

Description

Trace Compass 3.0 is a major release with API breakage, new features, and bugfixes.

This release will be part of Oxygen.

 

API Certification

The project leadership certifies that the APIs in this release are "Eclipse Quality".

Architectural Issues

There are no architectural changes in Trace Compass 3.0.0.

Security Issues

There are no security issues.

Non-Code Aspects

Trace Compass documentation is kept up-to-date for added and changed features. The developer and user guides are available as Eclipse help plug-ins and are part of the installable features. The latest released versions are also available on the Eclipse Foundation's web page.

Usability Details

In this release the user experience of  experiments have been improved. Experiments are set of traces where all events are ordered in chronologial order. Now, the project explorer shows all available analysis and views under the experiment that provided by each trace.

It is now also possible to open selected traces or trace folders directly as experiment using a newly added menu item.

The scalability of the tool has been enhanced. Until now, Segment Stores were backed by in memory data structures, limiting their size. Now, they can be also implemented in a similar way to the State History Tree, with an external memory tree data structure. This enables Segment Stores to store far more data and some efficient operations such as lazy iteration and lazy sorting. These new data structures are used by the System Call Analysis and the Scatter Graph Viewer.

End of Life

No end-of-life components.

Standards

Trace Compass comes with multipe built-in trace parsers for the following standard:

  • Common Trace Format (CTF) - v1.8.2

    • Linux LTTng kernel traces

    • Linux LTTng-UST userspace traces which can come from proprietary software or open source eg. Mir, MariaDB, QEMU traces

    • Other traces in CTF, e.g. Linux Perf traces (CTF), Bare metal traces (CTF), Hardware traces (e.g. IEEE Nexus 5001 CTF conversion).

  • GDB traces for debugging

  • Best Trace Format for OSEK

  • The libpcap (PAcket CAPture) format, for network traces

Trace Compass provides a remote tracer control for LTTng Kernel and UST Tracers for configuring of trace sessions. It supports the MI versions 2.0 and 3.0.

For the integration of the command-line analysis Trace Compass is able to consume analysis results specified by the LTTng Analysis Machine Interface.

Communities
  • 8 active committers from 3 different organizations

  • Trace Compass can be setup using Oomph.  We hope this lowers the barrier-to-entry and stimulates the growth of our community.

  • User interaction via Bugzilla, IRC chat (#tracecompass) and mailing list (tracecompass-dev@eclipse.org)

  • Bugzilla has been used for planning and bug tracking

  • Centralized update site and download page for the standalone RCP

  • Strong relationship with the LTTng project. Project members interact with this community via mailing list (lttng-dev@lists.lttng.org).

  • Many interactions with the CDT project. One committer is also committer in CDT.

  • Trace Compass has been the preferred Trace Analysis Tool for students as part of the trace research projects with the Polytechnique Montreal university. Many new features and enhancements for Trace Compass have been a direct outcome of  the reseach projects. See below for a link to the current active research track:

This release is part of Eclipse Oxygen