Paper Info
Title
EZIOTracer: unifying kernel and user space I/O tracing for data-intensive applications
Abstract
ABSTRACTTracing is a popular method for evaluating, investigating, and modeling the performance of today's storage systems. Tracing has become crucial with the increase in complexity of modern storage applications/systems, that are manipulating an ever-increasing amount of data and are subject to extreme performance requirements. There exists many tracing tools focusing either on the user-level or the kernel-level, however we observe the lack of a unified tracer targeting both levels: this prevents a comprehensive understanding of modern applications' storage performance profiles. In this paper, we present EZIOTracer, a unified I/O tracer for both (Linux) kernel and user spaces, targeting data intensive applications. EZIOTracer is composed of a userland as well as a kernel space tracer, complemented with a trace analysis framework able to merge the output of the two tracers, and in particular to relate user-level events to kernel-level ones, and vice-versa. On the kernel side, EZIOTracer relies on eBPF to offer safe, low-overhead, low memory footprint, and flexible tracing capabilities. We demonstrate using FIO benchmark the ability of EZIOTracer to track down I/O performance issues by relating events recorded at both the kernel and user levels. We show that this can be achieved with a relatively low overhead that ranges from 2% to 26% depending on the I/O intensity.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.1145/3439839.3458731
EUROSYS
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Storage system, tracing tools, Linux I/O stack, Kernel, eBPF
Conference
55
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
1
0163-5980
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
7
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Mohammed Islam Naas100.68
François Trahay2337.51
Alexis Colin300.34
Pierre Olivier411.72
Stephane Rubini55712.08
Frank Singhoff69317.70
Jalil Boukhobza783.88