Overview of QEMU tracing
Tracing is available for the first time in QEMU 0.14.0 and qemu-kvm 0.14.0. It's an optional feature and may not be enabled in distro packages yet, but it's there if you are willing to build from source.
QEMU tracing is geared towards answering questions about running virtual machines:
- What I/O accesses are being made to emulated devices?
- How long are disk writes taking to complete inside QEMU?
- Is QEMU leaking memory or other resources by not freeing them?
- Are network packets being received but filtered at the QEMU level?
In order to find answers to these questions we place trace events into the QEMU source code at strategic points. For example, every qemu_malloc() and qemu_free() call can be traced so we know what heap memory allocations are going on.
Current status
Today QEMU tracing is useful to developers and anyone troubleshooting or investigating bugs.
The set of trace events that comes with QEMU is limited but already useful for observing the block layer and certain emulated hardware. Developers are adding trace events to new code and converting some existing debug printfs to trace events. I expect the default set of trace events to grow and become more useful in the future.
Trace events are currently not a stable API so scripts that work with one version of QEMU are not guaranteed to work with another version. There is also no documentation on the semantics of particular trace events, so it is necessary to understand the code which contains the trace event to know its meaning. In the future we can make stable trace events with explicit semantics like "packet received from host".
QEMU tracing cross-platform support
You have a choice of trace backends: SystemTap, LTTng Userspace Tracer, and a built-in "simple" tracer are supported. DTrace could be added with little effort on Solaris, Mac OSX, and FreeBSD host platforms.
The available set of trace events is the same no matter which trace backend you choose.
Where to find out more
If you want to get started, check out the documentation that comes are part of QEMU.
Also check out the excellent QEMU 0.14.0 changelog for pointers related to tracing.
I looking forward to writing more about tracing in the future and sharing trace analysis scripts. In fact, I just submitted a patch to provide a Python API for processing trace files generated by the "simple" trace backend. It makes analyzing trace files quick and fun :).
