Project Ideas Improve Dynamic Build Tracing

Improve dynamic build tracing in TraceCode

TraceCode does system call tracing and relies on kernel-space system calls and in particular tracing file descriptors. This project should improve the tracing of the lifecycle of file descriptors when tracing a build with strace. We need to improve how TraceCode does system call tracing by improving the way we track open/close file descriptors in the trace to reconstruct the lifecycle of a traced file. This requires to understand and dive into the essence of system calls, the file lifecycle of a file from a kernel point of view, build datastructures and code to reconstruct user-space file activity from the kernel traces along a timeline.

This project also would cover updating TraceCode to use the Click command line toolkit (like for ScanCode).

• Level

  • Advanced

• Tech

  • Python, Linux kernel, system calls

• URLS

  • https://github.com/nexB/tracecode-toolkit for the existing non-static tool
  • https://github.com/nexB/scancode-toolkit-contrib for the work in progress on binaries/symbols parsers/extractors

• Mentor

  • @pombredanne https://github.com/pombredanne