Show HN: I wrote a tool in Rust for tracking all allocations in a Linux process
1–10 of 31 posts
Re: Show HN: I wrote a tool in Rust for tracking all allocations in a Linux process
#2That looks quite neat.
Though I'm currently not on a x64 linux, and since the main selling point seems to be the TUI it would be great to have a couple screenshots, or even better a gif of an asciinema recording (or whatever people use now).
Re: Show HN: I wrote a tool in Rust for tracking all allocations in a Linux process
#3Sounds interesting but I'd very much appreciate knowing what the output any exploration capabilities look like in allocscope-view before jumping into installation, maybe add some screenshots to the readme. Poking around the code it looks like a curses-based interface.
Re: Show HN: I wrote a tool in Rust for tracking all allocations in a Linux process
#4Interesting approach. How is performance compared to something like https://github.com/koute/bytehound
Re: Show HN: I wrote a tool in Rust for tracking all allocations in a Linux process
#5So it's like strace looking for brk()?
Re: Show HN: I wrote a tool in Rust for tracking all allocations in a Linux process
#6Let me guess: it made the HN front page because Rust.
Re: Show HN: I wrote a tool in Rust for tracking all allocations in a Linux process
#7So it's like strace looking for brk()?
Sorry if this is a dumb question, but can't strace trace brk() calls?
And as kind of a follow up what is the easiest way to trace all allocations (brk() and mmap) but nothing else?
Re: Show HN: I wrote a tool in Rust for tracking all allocations in a Linux process
#8Interesting approach. How is performance compared to something like https://github.com/koute/bytehound
Why is this being downvoted?
Edit: now this comment is being downvoted.
Re: Show HN: I wrote a tool in Rust for tracking all allocations in a Linux process
#9Thanks for sharing! I built a similar tool (also in Rust) which allows tracing system and library calls, and could be used for this purpose. I wanted to expose the functionality both as a library and CLI, but for now I’ve only published documentation on using the CLI.
Re: Show HN: I wrote a tool in Rust for tracking all allocations in a Linux process
#10Interesting approach. How is performance compared to something like https://github.com/koute/bytehound
Bytehound author here.
Just from a cursory look at the README:
> allocscope-trace attaches to another process as a debugger. By using breakpoints on memory allocation functions such as malloc it tracks allocations made by that process.
Looks like it's using breakpoints so I'd expect it to be orders of magnitude slower. And looking at the source code it's also using `libunwind`, so even if it wasn't using breakpoints it'd still be at least another order of magnitude slower since Bytehound has a custom unwinder that's specially optimized for this purpose.
One advantage it has is that it can be attached to an already running process; Bytehound can't do that. (I have ideas how I could do that, and it should be technically doable by dynamically injecting Bytehound's .so into the target process' address space, but so far I haven't needed it so I did not implement it)