Inspection of I/O Operations from System Call Traces using Directly-Follows-Graph

TL;DR

This paper introduces a method to analyze and compare I/O behaviors of programs by transforming system call traces into Directly-Follows-Graphs, enabling effective identification of behavioral differences.

Contribution

It presents a novel approach to synthesize system call traces into Directly-Follows-Graphs for comparing I/O behaviors across programs or configurations.

Findings

Successfully applied to IOR benchmark for contentions analysis

Identified differences in I/O behavior between program configurations

Demonstrated effectiveness in comparing system call traces

Abstract

We aim to identify the differences in Input/Output(I/O) behavior between multiple user programs through the inspection of system calls (i.e., requests made to the operating system). A typical program issues a large number of I/O requests to the operating system, thereby making the process of inspection challenging. In this paper, we address this challenge by presenting a methodology to synthesize I/O system call traces into a specific type of directed graph, known as the Directly-Follows-Graph (DFG). Based on the DFG, we present a technique to compare the traces from multiple programs or different configurations of the same program, such that it is possible to identify the differences in the I/O behavior. We apply our methodology to the IOR benchmark, and compare the contentions for file accesses when the benchmark is run with different options for file output and software interface.