Overview

This is a collection of experiments with unorthodox usages of gource for visualization. All of this is made possible thanks to the gource custom log format.

btrfs-gource

Render in gource the files changed since a certain BTRFS commit. The tools is based on btrfs subvolume find-new.

Example:

./btrfs-gource | ./gource-view
./btrfs-gource 1 | ./gource-view

trace-gource

Uses bpftrace to monitor activity on file descriptors and visualize it in gource. It currently monitors open, openat, read, write, close, socket, bind, connect, accept, recvfrom and sendto.

It runs the given command in a new cgroup so that we can easily monitor all the subprocesses.

Example:

./trace-gource "touch testfile" 2>/dev/null | ./gource-view
./trace-gource "find / -name '*.xml' -exec xml_pp {} \;" 2>/dev/null | ./gource-view

Implementation notes

• Note that due to a bpftrace limitation long paths will be cut.
• bpftrace does not seem to support custom functions, or macros. Therefore we employed the C preprocessor so that we can use C-style macros.

Creating a video

Replace ./gource-view with ./gource-mp4 $OUTPUT_FILE.