CallTracer

CallTracer is an instrument toolkit and aimed to provide an easy way for native(C/C++) program debugging, in particular, it can work as an utility to record and layout the program execution details in various straight-forward representation ways.(e.g: sequencing diagram, flamegraph)

It is compiled as a shared-lib and linked into a C/C++ program to enable the tracer. So far, it provides an user-friendly integration features for the program which is built upon gyp or waf, and also provides an out-of-box utility tool to convert the call stack into file names and source code line, finally be converted and presented by an appropriate visualizer, including: seqdiag, diagrams and flamegraph(default).

Features

Executable ELF (non-pie)
Static library
Dynamic linking library
Dynamic loading library
Tracing forked process
Multiple threads
Flamegraph
Seqdiag
Diagrams

If you are familiar with flamegraph, you might know about it originally is used for sampling data without an order guarantee. In calltracer, the generated flamegraph are for tracer data, and we will ensure the call stack sequencing following the tracer generated order.

Notable, turning on the func-trace will introduce significant performance impact, please avoid enabling it on a production environment.

Prerequisites for run the example

Linux OS (Tested on Ubuntu variants)
Have addr2line command installed on your system
Have node.js runtime on your environment
(optional) seqdiag command, only be required if you want to generate seqdiag style sequencing diagram

Example

The sample is just used to demonstrate the usages of the tool. To make the sample cover mores situations, e.g: executable ELF, static-lib, dynamic linking shared-lib, dynamic loading shared-lib, forked process and multiple-threads, I am trying to split the sample into various modules with different lib types, this definitely does not make a sense in a real-life program.

Sample Components

How to run

The project is using GYP as the compile tool.

git clone https://github.com/leezhenghui/calltracer.git 
git submodule update --init

make clean
make 
make run-debug 

Using below command to conver the trace log into a visualizer view:

  cd ./tools/iseq/ 
  npm install 
  ./tools/iseq/iseq

Visualizer

FlameGraph (default)

FlameGraph Example

Open the original image and click(zoon in) the flame block you are interested in and get more detailed invocation information followed by that point, e.g: invocation seq, invocation occurs timestamp, file name and source code line.

Seqdiag

Diagrams

TODO

Dynamic Tracer support, enable/disable the tracer on-the-fly
Support dlclose
Code refine/refactor

Join us

If you are interested in this project, please feel free to let me know, any bug-report/comments/suggestions/contribution on this project is appreciated. :-)

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