Lindon, UT — (press release excerpt) — Opersys and Lineo today announced the availability of the Linux Trace Toolkit (LTT) 0.9.4. LTT 0.9.4 is the first complete version of LTT to support the PowerPC processor family running Linux and the Real-Time Applications Interface (RTAI) in addition to the currently supported x86 processor family.

Although LTT for PowerPC has been available for standard Linux user-space tasks for many months, it has only now been modified to provide the capability to trace real-time Linux tasks running in the kernel memory space. LTT 0.9.4 also includes numerous bug fixes and facilities that allow events to be created dynamically. One facility, for instance, is used by IBM's DProbes project to log probe information within the traces collected by LTT.

Like the expensive time-tracing solutions available for many proprietary embedded RTOS solutions, LTT provides developers with all of the information necessary to reconstruct a system's behavior over a certain period of time. Using LTT, one can graphically view the precise dynamics of a system, answering such questions as . . .

• Who actually has access to the hardware during a specific time slice?
  
• What happens to an application when it receives data?
  
• Where are the I/O latencies in a given application?
  
• When is a specific application actually reading from disk?
  
• Why do certain synchronization problems occur?

LTT provides information through three primary graphical and text information displays, the event graph, the process analysis thumbnail and the raw list of events. These displays map the system's lowest level processes (such as scheduling decisions, process switches and various management tasks) to each high-level application — all plotted against the time axis.

LTT is an open source project that is freely distributable under the GNU General Public License. Additional information and a download for LTT are available on the Opersys LTT project page. Work on the LTT has been performed by Karim Yaghmour, the chief architect of LTT and founder of Opersys, Inc., with significant improvements performed under funding by Lineo, Inc.

Lineo Embedix SDK and Embedix RealTime toolkits include the Linux Trace Toolkit, as well as both step & trace and run-time debuggers, that combine to provide powerful system analysis and debug capabilities.

 
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