Graphical User Interface of Dynamic Tracing in Solaris

Graphical User Interface of Dynamic Tracing in Solaris

Background 

Operating system is the system software, which manages the hardware and software resources of computer. It is used to control procedures, improve the human-machine interface and support application of software. By mas-tering operating system, we can more deeply understand the computer system and use them more smoothly. The Solaris Operating System—supported on Intel x86 and SPARC platforms—delivers the performance, stability and security users and customers demand. With more applications available than for anyother open operating sys-tem, one OS can span your entire enterprise: theWeb tier, the datawarehouse, and the most demanding technical compute applications. Solaris Operating System supports many kinds of hardware frames,but also can run in all the main framework for the industry rather than rely on specific hardware vendors. In November 2005, Sun re-leased open-source operating system—Solaris 10. DTrace is a comprehensive dynamic tracing framework for the Solaris Operating Environment. DTrace provides a powerful infrastructure to permit administrators, developers, and service personnel to concisely answer arbitrary questions about the behavior of the operating system and user programs. 

Project Introduction

We use the system commands and dynamic tracing to analyze the core of the operating system so that we can deeply understand all the principles and methods of operating system design and implementation. It can detect exceptionsof processes and handle key service procedures,etc. However,it is not convenient for observation and analysis since those commands of Dtrace run in shell. This project generates a simple graphical user interface by using Glade 3—a User Interface Designer for GTK and GNOME. Users can chooseDScriptin Dtrace GUI and click RUN button to run D programs. The relative output of Dtrace will be display in the textbox of DtraceGUI. There isa  certain amount of D scriptin Dtrace GUI in order to directly run dynamic tracing. In addition, those familiar with D language can also use their own D scriptby clicking NEW button. At the same time, Dtrace GUI can save the D script. 

The purpose of this project is to provide the teaching circumstance of Operating System Practice. It reduces the input of commands which students need spend a lot of time to type in. So it is conducive to quickly and easily familiar with the tracing mechanism of Dtrace and operating. 

Key Research of Project

Understanding Solaris Operating System Internal and the major data structures and algorithms. For instance, Solaris Memory Architecture; Solaris Multi-threaded Process Architecture; Solaris Kernel Dispatcher; Inter process Communication, etc.