Introduction

blktrace is a block layer IO tracing mechanism which provides detailed information about request queue operations up to user space. There are three major components that are provided:

Kernel patch
A patch to the Linux kernel which includes the kernel event logging interfaces, and patches to areas within the block layer to emit event traces. If you run a 2.6.17-rc1 or newer kernel, you don't need to patch blktrace support as it is already included.

blktrace
A utility which transfers event traces from the kernel into either long-term on-disk storage, or provides direct formatted output (via blkparse).

blkparse
A utility which formats events stored in files, or when run in live mode directly outputs data collected by blktrace.



Subsections

krzysiek 2007-01-30