actf - An acute Common Trace Format (2) decoding library

actf is a C library for decoding Common Trace Format (CTF) Version 2 traces. The goal of actf is to be a lightweight, fast and spec-compliant CTF2 decoding library. It additionally includes a command-line utility actf that can read and print a CTF 2 trace stored on a file system.

actf is written for C11 and POSIX 2008. It has a single mandatory dependency, json-c, to facilitate the parsing of the JSON fragment based CTF2 metadata, and an optional dependency, lua 5.4, to allow for easy event processing through scripting.

actf provides you with the trace events and fields without imposing implicit costs for convenience sake: integer mappings and bit map flags are only looked up on demand, and strings and blobs are exposed in a zero-copy fashion. For strings, this means that the raw string you get access to from a field might not be null-terminated and this is the origin of the acute in the library name. If this worries you, I would advise you to check out the reference decoder babeltrace instead.

Since CTF2 is still in its infancy with regards to producers, this library is mainly built based on the specification. Perhaps it works or perhaps I have invented a decoder for a new custom binary format.

actf does not support CTF version 1.X

Building actf

actf is built with cmake:

$ mkdir build
$ cd build
$ cmake ..
$ make

The following options are supported by cmake:

Variable	Type	Default	Desc
BUILD_BIN	BOOL	ON	Whether to build the actf application
BUILD_TESTS	BOOL	ON	Whether to build unit tests
BUILD_DOC	BOOL	ON	Whether to build doxygen documentation
USE_LUA	BOOL	ON	Whether to include lua support

Running tests

Unit tests are cunit-based and can be executed by building a test executable (cmake option BUILD_TESTS) and then executing it. Here shown using build-directory build:

$ ./build/tests.out

actf is heavily tested using functional tests which are diffed against a reference-file. First make sure the test application is built (cmake option BUILD_BIN). The functional tests can then be executed with the runtests.sh script as follows (build-directory build):

$ ./runtests.sh -e ./build/actf

Building documentation

The public API of actf is documented using doxygen. It is built by enabling cmake option BUILD_DOC and then running make on the target doc.

$ mkdir build
$ cd build
$ cmake -DBUILD_DOC=ON ..
$ make doc
$ firefox html/index.html

Using libactf

Link to actf however you please and include the header actf/actf.h in your code.

#include <actf/actf.h>

See the examples folder for example applications and how to build them.

Lua scripting

actf has support for lua scripting if built with USE_LUA=ON. This allows you to write lua scripts to filter and/or analyze CTF events. The lua API is designed for ease of use and supports a subset of the actf API focused on accessing events and their fields. It is implemented as a lua filter that can be hooked up to any other event generator (such as from a CTF trace on the file system). If using the command-line tool actf you can pass a lua script with the -x flag and arguments with the -z flag.

For example, the following lua filter will filter out all events whose names are not matching the input arguments:

function actf.init(...)
   filtertbl = {}
   for i,v in ipairs(table.pack(...)) do
      filtertbl[v] = true
   end
end
 
function actf.filter(ev)
   return filtertbl[ev:name()] and 0 or 1
end

This could be run as actf -x <filter-file> -z <event-name0> -z <event-name1> <ctfpath>.

You can also use the lua filter for analyzing the trace data, see the dining philosopher example.

The lua API is documented in actf_lua_filter.h.

Multi-threading support

actf is single-threaded itself but uses no mutable static or global variables, so as long as each thread has their own mutable structs, it will be fine. E.g. two threads can run two separate actf_decoder in parallel using the same actf_metadata.

Deviations from CTF 2 specification

Fixed-length floating point number field class

The specification allows fixed-length floating point numbers to have the following lengths (bits):

• 16
• 32
• 64
• 128
• K, where K is greater than 128 and a multiple of 32

In actf, only lengths 32 and 64 is supported.

All fixed-length bit array derived classes

The specification does not put a limit on the number of bits a fixed-length bit array can represent.

In actf, the maximum length of a fixed-length bit array field is limited to 64.

This affects the following field classes:

• fixed-length bit array
• fixed-length bit map
• fixed-length boolean
• fixed-length floating point number

Variable-length integer field class

The specification does not limit the size of a variable-length integer.

In actf, a variable-length integer will be truncated to 64 bits.

Range JSON integer limitations

A range consists of two JSON integers which represent the lower and upper bound. JSON integers are not limited in size by a specification, so the actual bounds differ per implementation.

In actf, the following applies:

• For integer field class mappings, the ranges will be represented by int64_t or uint64_t based on if the holding integer field class is signed or not. Thus a fixed-length-unsigned-integer's mapping ranges can represent 0 to UINT64_MAX (inclusive), and a fixed-length-signed-integer's mapping ranges can represent INT64_MIN to INT64_MAX (inclusive).
  • A range out of bounds will be truncated or removed since an integer field wouldn't be able to represent it anyway.
• For selector-field-ranges of optional and variant field classes, each integer range set is required to be either fully representable as uint64_t or int64_t.
  • A range set containing one or more ranges with a negative JSON integer and a JSON integer larger than INT64_MAX is not supported and will cause an error. Such a range set cannot be represented by the implementation and could cause a wrong decoding.

License

LGPLv3.0 or later, see COPYING and COPYING.LESSER.