Characterization of POSIX IPC system calls usage of modern workloads

Based on a previous study on POSIX.1-2008 IPC standard, we aim to investigate and determine whether POSIX.1-2017 IPC standard syscalls are still being equally utilized by present-day workloads.

Installation

To install from our GitHub repository, you can do:

git clone https://github.com/Oleksandra2020/syscall_research.git
cd syscall_research

Requirements

The following command installs all necessary packages:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Data

To conduct our research we collected syscalls invocations of different modern workloads.

To accomplish that we utilized strace tool. Below you can see the table with used software and types of operation for data collection:

Type	Application	Operations
console utilities	htop	3 min
compilers	gcc	compile a library Glog
browsers	chrome	browse, bookmark
browsers	firefox	browse, bookmark
ai/ml packages	ai algorithm	train SVM classifier on 5000 samples
office packages	libreoffice	write a text, insert an image, bold the text, save doc as file on disk
console utilities	gzip	compress 20 Gb file and decompress
networking utilities	openssh	connect to remote server, ls command, mkdir test && cd test, cd .., rm -rf test
video player	VLC media player	watch 5 min of video, speed up
http server	Apache	POST and GET for 100 requests with Apache Benchmark

Metrics for evaluation

1. no. of (IPC) system calls: number of syscall invocation / number of experiments
2. importance of (IPC) system calls: number of workloads that use syscall
3. % of IPC system calls: number of IPC system call / number of IPC system calls in total

Usage

• Number of invocations of each syscall:

python3 parser.py <directory with all files>
python3 paser.py <directory with files with one type of software results>

• importance:

python3 importance_metric.py <directory with all files>
python3 importance_metric.py <directory with files with one type of software results>

• Number of IPC syscalls:

python3 extract_ipc.py <directory with all files>
python3 extract_ipc.py <directory with files with one type of software results>

• importance of IPC syscalls:

python3 importance_ipc.py <directory with all files>
python3 importance_ipc.py <directory with files with one type of software results>

• % of IPC syscalls:

python3 calculate_ipc.py <directory with all files>
python3 calculate_ipc.py <directory with files with one type of software results>

Results

Contributing

Pull requests are welcome. For major changes, please open an issue first to discuss what you would like to change. Please make sure to update tests as appropriate (ha!).