shhuiw's Technotes

bno_plot - generate interactive 3D plot of IO blocks and sizes

To use this utility, the gnuplot package needs to be installed.

bno_plot is a visualization tool for the block layer IO tracing tool called blktrace(8). As noted in its documentation, blktrace is a block layer IO tracing mechanism which provides detailed information about request queue operations up to user space.

bno_plot utilizes gnuplot to generate a 3D plot of the block number output from btt. If no <files> are specified, it will utilize all files generated after btt was run with -B blknos (meaning: all files of the form blknos*[rw].dat). The display will display each IO generated, with the time (seconds) along the X-axis, the block number (start) along the Y-axis and the number of blocks transferred in the IO represented along the Z-axis.

    bno_plot    [ -h | --help ]
                [ -v | --verbose ]
                [ -K | --keys-below ]
                [ <file...> ]

The -K option forces bno_plot to put the keys below the graph. If it is not specified, all keys for input files are put in the upper right corner of the graph. If the number of devices exceed 10, then bno_plot will automatically push the keys under the graph.

To exit the plotter, enter 'quit' or ^D at the 'gnuplot> ' prompt.