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Teaching the GNU/Linux Operating System with the LTTNG Kernel Tracer

1 Abstract Computer systems involve increasingly complex hardware components and software abstractions, e.g. an Xen Hypervisor managing virtual machines running on a multi-core CPU. In the industry, computer engineers are asked to understand these technologies. To tackle this task, companies developing large scale and embedded systems rely on tracing tools to get precise performance monitoring and behavior analysis information. This paper first discusses the industry need for computer engineers with a good understanding of computer systems. Subsequently, it illustrates how the Linux Trace Toolkit Next Generation (LTTNG) kernel tracer, widely used in the industry, can be used to explain operating system con- cepts through realistic examples. Finally, the methodology used to introduce these examples to undergraduate computer engineering students is outlined. 2 Introduction As today’s computer systems sophistication level increases, it becomes harder for an aspiring computer engineer to understand the interactions between hardware and high level applications, because Virtual Machine Managers (Hypervisors) and operating systems abstract them. With the appearance of central processing units with multiple cores in commodity hardware, and the widespread use of virtualization, typical industrial systems are increasingly complex. Concur- rently, the amount of time spent in curriculum on low level computer organization and system programming may be compressed to make room for software architecture and higher level lan- guage courses. Yet, a good understanding of the system level issues helps the computer engineer to develop and debug efficient, possibly real-time, multi-threaded applications. The Linux Trace Toolkit Next Generation (LTTNG) tracer gathers a sequence of events from the Linux kernel, core of the operating system, which manages the hardware and provides services to user-space processes (standard programs). It provide a precise post-mortem playback of the system execution and helps understanding complex interactions between these programs, becoming espe- cially useful when processes are made of many execution threads or when a lot of inter-process communication is done. It can also extract execution traces from the Xen Hypervisor to help studying interactions between multiple virtual machines running on a computer. It has been used in an advanced Operating Systems undergraduate course to show the precise sequence of events occurring in common cases such as a packet being received, a disk read/write or a keyboard key being pressed. LTTNG was primarily developed for the computer industry and is currently used on large systems at Google, IBM Research, Autodesk and in the embedded systems fields at Monta Vista, Sony and Wind River. It provides an hands-on, in-depth understanding of the interactions between applications and between the different execution layers, including the user-space, operating system and Hypervisors. This paper presents an overview of the actual industry requirements regarding computer scientists, briefly reviews the capabilities of LTTNG and then discusses how this tool was used in a course to illustrate, in a direct and intuitive way, the behavior of real, complex, computer systems.

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Desnoyers, M., & Dagenais, M. (2008, June), Teaching Real Operating Systems With The Lttng Kernel Tracer Paper presented at 2008 Annual Conference & Exposition, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. 10.18260/1-2--3804