GSoC - All missing reports

[Fabien Parent <parent f gmail com>]

Hello,

This year I was "forced" to send all my GSoC reports on a blog
aggregated by pgo, and I forgot to send several of them on the ml.
Because I don't plan to keep the blog online forever I am posting all
the missing here for archive.

===

GSoC Report: Week #6 and #7
UI Rework
I initially developed the UI as fast as possible to concentrate on the
development of the profiling engine. This last weeks I have been
working on unifying the dialogs of the debugging perspective and the
profiling perspective, and on other various UI improvements.

Attaching the profiler to a running process.
It is now possible to attach the profiler to a running process via the
same dialog that the one of the debugging perspective. There is still
a major issue: It is possible to profile a running process only if we
start Nemiver as root.
I tried to fix this in different ways like by using pkexec, but each
time I was creating a new issue until I was definitely blocked.
To fix this I will have to develop a server process using PolicyKit to
be able to start the profiling of an already running process without
having to be root.

Preferences dialog
Until now Nemiver was only able to run the profiler with its default
settings, but I have started to develop the preferences dialog of the
profiling perspective. It's just a start because there is still a lot
more perf options to support, but I will implement them as needed.

What is coming next?
The next days I will be working on the support of profiling an already
running process without having to launch Nemiver as root.

===

GSoC - Status Report
I have been busy the past weeks looking for a new flat so I haven't
made as much progress as I hoped. But I still have a few things to say
in this report.

Profiling of running process
I have been working on adding the ability to profile existing running
processes, it is currently working but my code is not yet very secure
and clean, I'm still working on that.
To profile a running process I'm starting a service as root thanks to
D-BUS activation capability and sending the required information to
profile a running process.
I spent a lot of time debugging my work thanks to using existing
examples of D-BUS usage without even reading the docs. It even made me
recompile D-BUS to understand what was going wrong in my
application...

What is coming next?
For the coming week I will work on securing the code by fixing
security issues and by using policykit.
After that I will review all the code and prepare some patches I will
send on the Nemiver mailing-list for review.

The end of this year GSoC is close, and since, starting today I have
more time to spent on it than in the past 2 weeks, I will give 100% to
have almost everything done by the end of this GSoC.

===

Final Report
After 3 months of hard work, this Google Summer of Code is coming to
an end. This was my second participation in the GSoC program and it
will sadly be my last because in less 2 months I won't be a student
anymore.

It's the perfect time to summarize what has been done during the past
3 months. In the past 3 months I have added the ability for nemiver to
support multiple perspectives, then I have added a perspective that
let the user profile an application using perf as profiler.
Nemiver is now able to start and profile a process, attach the
profiler to a running process, or profile the whole system.

The code is almost ready to be merged into master, there is still one
or two clean-up to do, and to add some comments to the code. I have
already sent a patch for review and fixed the code following Dodji's
recommendations.

I plan to complete quickly all the work I have done on this GSoC, and
then I will go back to the console I was implementing in the debugging
perspective before the GSoC started. The work on the later was almost
done, so this won't take too much time. After that I don't know yet on
what I will be working on next, may be on adding a perspective that
will implement a GUI for memcheck.

Fabien