silicon

Silicon is a command line tool used for debugging and profiling Linux kernel latency issues. It is designed to help developers analyze and understand the sources of latency in their systems.

One of Silicon's key features is its ability to trace latency in real-time at microsecond granularity. It achieves this by leveraging various kernel tracing mechanisms, such as ftrace and perf events.

Silicon provides a set of latency "probes" that can be inserted into the kernel code to measure the time taken for specific operations or functions. These probes can be selectively enabled or disabled based on the user's requirements.

The tool generates detailed latency reports, which can be viewed in the terminal or exported to various formats such as HTML or JSON. These reports include information on latency distribution, top contributors to latency, and latency over time.

Silicon also allows users to watch specific functions or events, tracing all invocations and collecting statistics on them. This can help in understanding the behavior of specific components or operations.

The tool supports filtering events based on various criteria, allowing users to focus on specific aspects of latency analysis. It also offers options for customizing the output, including sorting, aggregating, and filtering data for easier analysis.

Silicon is open-source software, released under the GNU General Public License (GPL). It is actively maintained and has a growing community of contributors.

It is written in the Rust programming language, which provides the benefits of high performance, memory safety, and concurrency.

Silicon is designed to work on x86 and ARM architectures, making it compatible with a wide range of Linux-based systems.

Overall, Silicon is a powerful and flexible command line tool for analyzing and debugging latency issues in the Linux kernel, providing developers with valuable insights into system performance.