Adding tracing to device drivers

This document describes how to add tracing to device drivers.

Overview

Please read Fuchsia Tracing System Design 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:example1", "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:example1” 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. By convention categories have the format “:[:...]”. “” for drivers should generally by the driver name. This is done to avoid collisions in category names across the entire system. A potential augmentation to this convention is to prefix all driver categories with “driver:”. E.g., “driver:ethernet:packets”. Avoiding naming collisions with other trace providers is important, otherwise the user may ask for a particular category and get completely unrelated data from a different trace provider.

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

Note that currently the default is that no code will be generated by the addition of these TRACE_*() macros. Akin to <assert.h>'s use of #define NDEBUG to disable assert()s, tracing uses #define NTRACE to disable tracing. NTRACE is currently defined by default unless ENABLE_DRIVER_TRACING=true is passed to make. See below.

Makefile additions

The following addition to your driver's rules.mk file is needed to pick up tracing support:

ifeq ($(call TOBOOL,$(ENABLE_DRIVER_TRACING)),true)
MODULE_STATIC_LIBS += system/ulib/trace.driver
endif
MODULE_HEADER_DEPS += system/ulib/trace system/ulib/trace-engine

Booting with tracing

To be super conservative, not only does tracing currently require a special compile flag to enable it: ENABLE_DRIVER_TRACING=true, it also requires an extra kernel command line flag to enable it: driver.tracing.enable=1

ENABLE_DRIVER_TRACING=true is now the default. To disable driver tracing, pass ENABLE_DRIVER_TRACING=false to make.

Example:

First build:

$ fx set $arch
$ fx build-zircon
$ fx build

Then boot. With QEMU:

$ fx run -k -N -c driver.tracing.enable=1

Or on h/w (augment with options specific to your h/w):

$ fx serve -- -- driver.tracing.enable=1

These extra requirements will be removed once tracing support stabilizes.

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.

Example:

fuchsia$ trace record --categories=example:example1
host$ fx cp --to-host /data/trace.json trace.json

However, it's easier to invoke the traceutil program on your development host and it will copy the files directly to your host and prepare them for viewing with the Chrome trace viewer.

host$ fx traceutil record --categories=example:example1

See the Tracing Usage Guide for further info.