Section 8 · System administration

bcc-ext4dist.8

Package: bcc-tools

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ext4dist

NAME
SYNOPSIS
DESCRIPTION
REQUIREMENTS
OPTIONS
EXAMPLES
FIELDS
OVERHEAD
SOURCE
OS
STABILITY
AUTHOR
SEE ALSO

NAME

ext4dist − Summarize ext4 operation latency. Uses Linux eBPF/bcc.

SYNOPSIS

ext4dist [−h] [−T] [−m] [−p PID] [interval] [count]

DESCRIPTION

This tool summarizes time (latency) spent in common ext4 file operations: reads, writes, opens, and syncs, and presents it as a power-of-2 histogram. It uses an in-kernel eBPF map to store the histogram for efficiency.

Since this works by tracing the ext4_file_operations interface functions, it will need updating to match any changes to these functions.

Since this uses BPF, only the root user can use this tool.

REQUIREMENTS

CONFIG_BPF and bcc.

OPTIONS


	−h		Print usage message.
	−T		Don’t include timestamps on interval output.
	−m		Output in milliseconds.
	−p PID		Trace this PID only.

EXAMPLES

Trace ext4 operation time, and print a summary on Ctrl-C:

ext4dist

Trace PID 181 only:

ext4dist -p 181

Print 1 second summaries, 10 times:

ext4dist 1 10

1 second summaries, printed in milliseconds

ext4dist −m 1

FIELDS


	msecs		Range of milliseconds for this bucket.
	usecs		Range of microseconds for this bucket.
	count		Number of operations in this time range.

distribution

ASCII representation of the distribution (the count column).

OVERHEAD

This adds low-overhead instrumentation to these ext4 operations, including reads and writes from the file system cache. Such reads and writes can be very frequent (depending on the workload; eg, 1M/sec), at which point the overhead of this tool may become noticeable. Measure and quantify before use.

SOURCE

This is from bcc.

https://github.com/iovisor/bcc

Also look in the bcc distribution for a companion _examples.txt file containing example usage, output, and commentary for this tool.

OS

Linux

STABILITY

Unstable - in development.

AUTHOR

Brendan Gregg