DTrace Gnome System Monitor

DTrace Gnome System Monitor

Background

Writing an user-friendly GUI for DTrace, a new and exciting feature in
Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris,is a cool yet not so easy to achieve work. DTrace is a very extensible tool.
It carries out the instructions in a D script to monitor some specific system behaviors.So it is nearly impossible to write a general GUI for DTrace. The major difficulties are the following:
*There are too many possible formats of output data, so it is
impossible to write an uniform GUI;
*If we want to put all the features of DTrace into a GUI, we have to
ask users to provide a D script.

Feature

one set is tracing some behaviors of an arbitrary selected process
This includes:
*Syscal staticstics. Which syscals did a process call? How many
times the process call each syscal?
How much time did the process been in each syscal? You can answer
the above questions with this feature.
*File I/O statistics. Trace the read/write bytes for each fd the
process opened.
*Scheduling status. Trace the scheduling status of the process.
*Dynamic stack trace. Dynamically print the function call stack of
the process while it's running.

This feature is useful for hacking some programs. Because it can dynamically trace process stack, it is generally more convenient than a debuger.

the other set is tracing some system-wide behaviors. This includes:
*Disk I/O. Trace the top 4 disk I/O consuming processes and display
their disk I/O percents in four curves.
*TCP traffic. Trace the top 4 TCP traffic intensive processes and
display their traffic percents in four curves.

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