A Multi-Threading Trace Tool for NPTL (glibc) : PTT

[Tony Reix <tony.reix@bull.net>]

Hi,
 
As part of our project named "Stabilization of NPTL", we had students
during 1H05 who developed a tool for tracing the calls to NPTL and for
tracing the internal behavior of NPTL : PTT.
 
I've described this work in the OLS'05 paper, pages 118-129 of Vol2:
        http://www.linuxsymposium.org/2005/linuxsymposium_procv2.pdf

I may provide you the slides if needed.

See details about PTT at:
        http://nptltracetool.sourceforge.net/
        http://sourceforge.net/projects/nptltracetool/
A Debian package already exists.

Though -as explained in the paper- the scalability of this tool must be
improved for large machines, it can already help:
  a) developers facing problems with POSIX multi-threading on Linux, and
  b) maintainers of the NPTL.
 
So, in order to make this tool easily usable by customers, the next
steps would be:
  1) to have this tool integrated into a distribution, and
  2) to have this tool integrated into the glibc.


Is the Debian community interested in delivering this tool ?


- Inaky Perez-Gonzalez (Intel) (working on the robust mutexes) said to
me that such a tool would have greatly helped him when he started his
project.
- Also, we were in contact with IBM maintainers who faced complex
multi-threading problems and gave us requirements for the tool.

 
Thanks,
 
Regards,
 
Tony