Visualization toolkit for Linux kernel tracing and performance verification

Abstract

Linux is one of the most representative operating systems. And Linux kernel is currently being used in various fields and developed by many researchers and developers. Linux kernel developers need a toolkit to monitor the performance of developed systems and detect errors in order to meet the expectations. In this paper, we propose Kernel-Ray that is the visualization toolkit for Linux. It is able to trace the internal functions of Linux kernel and visualize the internal operations of the system using graphs and tables. Also it expresses the interruption latency of Linux kernel in graphs, and thus easily allows Linux kernel developers to monitor performance and errors.