Python – Writing a kernel mode profiler for processes in python

kernelpython

I would like seek some guidance in writing a "process profiler" which runs in kernel mode. I am asking for a kernel mode profiler is because I run loads of applications and I do not want my profiler to be swapped out.

When I said "process profiler" I mean to something that would monitor resource usage by the process. including usage of threads and their statistics.

And I wish to write this in python. Point me to some modules or helpful resource.

Please provide me guidance/suggestion for doing it.

Thanks,

Edit::: Would like to add that currently my interest isto write only for linux. however after i built it i will have to support windows.

Best Answer

It's going to be very difficult to do the process monitoring part in Python, since the python interpreter doesn't run in the kernel.

I suspect there are two easy approaches to this:

use the /proc filesystem if you have one (you don't mention your OS)
Use dtrace if you have dtrace (again, without the OS, who knows.)

Okay, following up after the edit.

First, there's no way you're going to be able to write code that runs in the kernel, in python, and is portable between Linux and Windows. Or at least if you were to, it would be a hack that would live in glory forever.

That said, though, if your purpose is to process Python, there are a lot of Python tools available to get information from the Python interpreter at run time.

If instead your desire is to get process information from other processes in general, you're going to need to examine the options available to you in the various OS APIs. Linux has a /proc filesystem; that's a useful start. I suspect Windows has similar APIs, but I don't know them.

If you have to write kernel code, you'll almost certainly need to write it in C or C++.

Related Solutions

Python – Replacements for switch statement in Python

The original answer below was written in 2008. Since then, Python 3.10 (2021) introduced the match-case statement which provides a first-class implementation of a "switch" for Python. For example:

def f(x):
    match x:
        case 'a':
            return 1
        case 'b':
            return 2
        case _:        
            return 0   # 0 is the default case if x is not found

The match-case statement is considerably more powerful than this simple example.

You could use a dictionary:

def f(x):
    return {
        'a': 1,
        'b': 2,
    }[x]

Python – What’s the canonical way to check for type in Python

To check if o is an instance of str or any subclass of str, use isinstance (this would be the "canonical" way):

if isinstance(o, str):

To check if the type of o is exactly str (exclude subclasses):

if type(o) is str:

The following also works, and can be useful in some cases:

if issubclass(type(o), str):

See Built-in Functions in the Python Library Reference for relevant information.

One more note: in this case, if you're using Python 2, you may actually want to use:

if isinstance(o, basestring):

because this will also catch Unicode strings (unicode is not a subclass of str; both str and unicode are subclasses of basestring). Note that basestring no longer exists in Python 3, where there's a strict separation of strings (str) and binary data (bytes).

Alternatively, isinstance accepts a tuple of classes. This will return True if o is an instance of any subclass of any of (str, unicode):

if isinstance(o, (str, unicode)):

Thanks,

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Python – Replacements for switch statement in Python

Python – What’s the canonical way to check for type in Python

Related Topic