The Linux Foundation Announces Linux Performance Workgroup

August 19, 2015

The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux and collaborative development, today announced the DiaMon workgroup, which is creating a de-facto standard for tracing and monitoring infrastructure in order to improve diagnostics of Linux user space programs.

Founding members of the DiaMon workgroup include EfficiOS, Freescale, Google, Harman, Hitachi, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Netflix, Qualcomm, Red Hat, SUSE and Wind River. The workgroup will bring together developers and users to standardize on interfaces and common exchange formats. The effort should improve the effectiveness of Linux performance testing tools.

“We hope that Linux Foundation workgroups can give the community a neutral place to advance Linux and collaborative technologies. The DiaMon workgroup is a perfect example of this by bringing community members together to advance work on an important area for Linux today and into the future. It is this collaborative work that sustains Linux’s success,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director at Linux Foundation.

With the increasing complexity of both the software and hardware ecosystem, it is becoming more difficult to understand computing problems when they arise. At the same time, the requirements of enterprise Linux users are getting more demanding; higher throughput is needed but at bounded latency due to functions like video streaming, for example. Significant time is required to investigate programs that have typically not been diagnosed together, such as open source components and libraries and third party, proprietary software.

The DiaMon Workgroup will create de-facto standards and tools for tracing, monitoring and diagnostics. It should increase interoperability among tools, as well as improve Linux-based tracing, profiling, logging and monitoring features. It will include software and tools that include trace data creation; activation; collection and storage; postmortem analysis tools; visualization tools; ability to move analysis from postmortem to live/monitoring; scripting; data conversion; and correlation and analysis of different sources of trace data. The DiaMon workgroup will also enable end users to exchange user guides, white papers, data sheets and general guidelines about diagnostic and monitoring best practices tools analysis.

"When performance analysis gets hard, out come the tracers. For Linux tracing it's an exciting time, with numerous tracing projects rapidly innovating in different directions. It's hard to keep up! But we need to keep up, especially to coordinate the different efforts and to bring the engineers together, which is what DiaMon has been successfully doing,” said Brendan Gregg, Netflix.

"High performance/price ratio is key to successful IoT devices and infrastructures. Tracing is one of the most powerful way to improve this ratio through visualization of operating system and applications behavior. The DiaMon workgroup is making a significant contribution to IoT by orchestrating the Linux tracing initiatives and getting synergy between commercial and open source contributors,” said Philippe Maisonneuve, Wind River.

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