[openbmc-tools] dbus-vis: DBus capture visualization tool

Sui Chen suichen6 at gmail.com
Sat Jul 25 08:59:27 AEST 2020


Hello,

dbus-vis is a GUI tool that does the following:
- It visualizes busctl pcap files, the same format that dbus-pcap reads and
parses.
- It somewhat half-automates the process of doing a capture on the BMC and
transferring back to the host for analysis (console access to the BMC is
required for this purpose.)

dbus-vis started from an IPMI timeline visualization tool that only
processes IPMI requests exposed on DBus. After I learned about dbus-pcap
<https://github.com/openbmc/openbmc-tools/tree/master/amboar/obmc-scripts/dbus-pcap>,
it turns out DBus visualization is a natural extension to this
visualization tool. Because this tool currently accepts the same packet
capture format that dbus-pcap uses (by using a slightly modified version of
dbus-pcap), it kind of functions like a GUI version of dbus-pcap, and is
therefore named "dbus-vis" to indicate what it does.

The main difference between this tool and other existing dbus visualizers
(such as GNU bustle) is that dbus-vis shows data in a compact timeline
format, making it possible to show >10K events simultaneously on the screen
at an acceptable frame rate, as well as making it easier to focus on DBus
performance rather than the dependency of different DBus units (that other
existing tools seem to be focusing on.)

The changes for the first commit of dbus-vis is listed below; any comment
is greatly appreciated.
https://gerrit.openbmc-project.xyz/c/openbmc/openbmc-tools/+/34263

Thanks!
Sui
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