Tracepoints

You can perform trace operations in Tizen native applications with the T-trace tool. The tool allows you to generate traces and visualize them.

With the T-trace API, you can create custom tracepoints in your application. The tracepoints allow the framework to write application traces to the system trace buffer to align them with the T-trace traces from the Tizen platform.

Figure: T-trace architecture

T-trace architecture

The following T-trace function types are provided for application-level tracepoints:

  • Synchronous tracing functions: trace_begin() and trace_end()
  • Asynchronous tracing functions: trace_async_begin() and trace_async_end()
  • Counter tracking function: trace_update_counter()

Prerequisites

To enable your application to use the T-trace functionality:

  1. To use the functions and data types of the T-trace API (in mobile and wearable applications), include the <trace.h> header file in your application:

    #include <trace.h>

  2. Make sure you have the libttrace.so T-trace library. The T-trace library provides a tracing function to write traces to the system trace buffer.

  3. Check that the following prerequisites are fulfilled:

    • linux-2.6.27 kernel
    • debugfs mounted on /sys/kernel/debug

Inserting Tracepoints

To insert tracepoints:

  • Use synchronous tracing.

    If the trace event starts and ends in a same context within the same process, thread, and function, use the trace_begin() and trace_end() functions to track the event. Note that every trace_begin() function matches up with a trace_end() function that occurs after it.

    int
main(void)
{
    int integer = 12;
    trace_begin("event name: %d", integer);

    trace_end();

    return 0;
}

  • Use asynchronous tracing.

    If the trace event starts and ends in a different context, use the trace_async_begin() and trace_async_end() functions to track the event. Note that every trace_async_begin() function matches with a trace_async_end() function that has the same name and cookie. As the cookie provides an identifier among several events, it must have a unique integer value.

    void
function1()
{
    int cookies_f1 = 123;

    trace_async_begin(cookies_f1, "event name");
}

void
function2()
{
    int cookies_f2 = 123;

    trace_async_end(cookies_f2, "event name");

}

  • Track the trace counter.

    To track the change of an integer counter on your application, use the trace_update_counter() function:

    void
function2(int count)
{
    trace_update_counter(count, "event_name");
}
  • Dependencies
    • Tizen 2.4 and Higher for Mobile
    • Tizen 3.0 and Higher for Wearable
Edit this page