Adding tracing to device drivers

This document describes how to add tracing to device drivers.

Overview

Please read Fuchsia tracing system for an overview of tracing.

Trace Provider

Drivers don't have to specify a Trace Provider, the devhost process via libdriver.so provides it. It is mentioned here in case the topic comes up.

Adding trace records

Source additions

Trace records are easiest to add by invoking the TRACE_*() macros from ddk/trace/event.h.

There are various kinds of trace records that can be emitted. Please see trace/internal/event_common.h for a description of the various macros.

Looking up macro documentation from internal implementation files is a temporary situation. Ultimately such documentation will live in a more appropriate place.

Example:

#include <ddk/trace/event.h>

void DoSomething(int a, std::string b) {
  TRACE_DURATION("example", "DoSomething", "a", a, "b", b);

  // Do something
}

The first two arguments to most macros are the “category” and the event name. Here they are “example” and “DoSomething” respectively.

Trace categories are how the tracing system lets the user specify what data to collect. If a category is not requested by the user then the data is not collected.

Categories don't need to be unique across the driver. One typically groups several events under the same category.

The event name is included in the trace to describe what the event is about. It is typically unique for each event.

BUILD.gn additions

The following addition to your driver's BUILD.gn target is needed to pick up tracing support:

driver_module("my_driver") {
  deps = [
    ...
    "//zircon/system/ulib/trace"
    "//zircon/system/ulib/trace:trace-driver",
  ]
}

Building with tracing

The following needs to be passed to fx set in order to trace drivers that are loaded during boot: --with-base=//garnet/packages/prod:tracing.

$ fx set ${PRODUCT}.${BOARD} --with-base=//garnet/packages/prod:tracing
$ fx build

The issue is that without this option then TraceManager won‘t be present when the driver starts and thus the driver won’t be able to participate in tracing when TraceManager is started later.

See the documentation for fx or even just the output of fx help and especially fx help set for further documentation of running fx in general and fx set specifically.

Booting with tracing

To be conservative, tracing uses a kernel command line flag to enable it: driver.tracing.enable=1. driver.tracing.enable=1 is the default. To disable participation of drivers in Fuchsia tracing, boot the kernel with driver.tracing.enable=0.

Then boot. See the documentation for your hardware or qemu for instructions for booting the device. Tracing doesn't require anything special during boot.

Using tracing

Once the system is booted you can collect traces on the target and then manually copy them to your development host. These examples use the category from the source additions described above.