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Workload-kit - Trace set generator
==================================

Introduction
------------

Workload-kit is a set of utilities to generate various kind of workloads on a
system, aimed at generating traces that presents recognizable features. The
generated trace set could be used as a basis to validate trace analysis
algorithms. Workload-kit makes it easy to generate the trace set on any
architecture in a reproducible way.

Requirements
------------

Workload-kit uses Autotools as build system. Recent GNU compiler and
C standard library is required.

Build libraries required:

  * liblttng-ust > 2.0
  * libsensors4-dev

Generating traces requires:

  * lttng-tools >= 2.0
  * lttng-modules >= 2.0
  * python >= 2.7
  * cpuburn
  * openbsd-netcat
  * coreutils

Overview
--------

The package has 4 main components:
  
  * Plain C executables in src/
  * C executables instrumented with LTTng-UST in ust/
  * Standard workload scripts in scripts/
  * lttng-simple in utils/

C language is used to get better precision about the underlying system calls
that are made by programs. These programs usually accept parameters to 
fine-tune the desired load. All executables are prefixed with "wk-".

Load scripts encapsulate a series of steps to perform an experiment with 
fixed parameter values. Scripts may use provided wk executables, but can
also use other tools, provided they are open source and listed in the
dependencies. 

lttng-simple is a small utility to generate one trace per script in batch 
mode, for either kernel or user-space tracing. The resulting traces forms
the trace set. 

Generating the trace set
------------------------
Running this command, with a user in the tracing group, or as root, and with
the default paths:

 export TRACE_SET_DIR=/tmp/trace-set/
 mkdir $TRACE_SET_DIR
 lttng-simple -o /tmp/trace-set/ -b /usr/local/share/workload-kit/scripts/

For best results, generate traces on an idle machine without graphical 
interface, and if doing so with SSH, then the log file option can be used to
prevent generating network I/O.

Contributing
------------

Needs some specific trace for your trace analysis algorithmic unit testing?
Contributions are welcome! For backward compatibility, existing trace scripts
will be kept between major releases of workload-kit, and mark them as 
deprecated to allow other developers to cope with change. New trace scripts or
executables can be added anytime.

Few requirements:
 * Scripts must be non-interactive
 * Scripts must work by default without any manual configuration
 * If special dependencies are required, they must be documented
 * If a script creates temp files, they must be cleaned

Code style:
 * Python code is indented with 4 spaces
 * C code style follow (approximately) linux kernel coding style
   (yes, there is cleanup to do)

Happy hacking!