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M. Mayer:
"Design and Implementation of a File-System Based Monitoring Interface for the Time-Triggered Communications Protocol TTP/C under Linux";
Supervisor: H. Kopetz, T. Galla; Institut für Technische Informatik, 2000.

Monitoring is the process of gathering run-time information about a computer program or a hardware device. This information may be used, e. g., for debugging purposes or to supervise normal program execution.

This thesis presents an easy-to-use file-system based monitoring interface for the Time Triggered Architecture. It was implemented under Linux, a freely available UNIX operating system. As a pure software monitoring approach it does not require any specialised monitoring hardware. Moreover, there is no need to insert special instrumentation-code in the application being monitored.

The Process File System was chosen as interface, since it allows to access the monitoring data in a simple way. Furthermore it is a stable and well-defined interface that is used widely throughout the Linux kernel. The driver itself was implemented as two separate kernel modules to take the application independent (i. e. generic) and the application dependent part of the monitoring data into account. The generic module may also be used in a stand-alone way, while the application-dependent module relies on functionality provided by the generic module.

Adaption of the application-dependent module to new applications and reconfiguration is achieved through a description language that was developed as part of this thesis. A preprocessor uses a definition file in this description language to generate C-code that is subsequently compiled and linked to the kernel module. The application-dependent part of the driver is thus concentrated in a single file that requires only minimal changes for new applications.

http://www.vmars.tuwien.ac.at/php/pserver/extern/docdetail.php?DID=338&viewmode=thesis