Google Summer of Code Updates from Week #7 (July 10th to July 14th)

With the 7th week of GSoC gone, we bring updates on what has been happening in this blog, with news from our mentors and contributors.

Updates from Veronica, our GSoC Admin

Another week passed, and it's hard to believe we are halfway through the Google Summer of Code! We are happy with the progress so far from both our contributors. The last week has met us mentors with travels and a bit less time, but we are proud to see how our contributors continue working and progressing on their milestones and tasks! Working with free software and as a University is challenging. The academic demands are oftentimes not well aligned with writing code and maintaining such a complex tool as Slips. This is why it is so important for us to be part of the GSoC and be able to foster a community around Slips to help move it forward.

Updates from Daniel, our Slips Performance Contributor

This week, I did some final edits to the cpu profiling implementation by adding an additional config setting to change the size of the profiling buffer so that machines with more memory can more effectively utilize those resources to profile if necessary. I also implemented dev mode for memory profiling by integrating memray into the project. I created a class interface similar to cpu profiling and config settings in the slips.conf file. I was initially concerned about whether multiprocess data would be profilable but the memray tool had built-in multi-process profiling capabilities so I was able to easily integrate that as a config setting. Since the tool generates binary data files but doesn’t automatically convert them into directly viewable output, for the memory profiling termination behavior I wrote a small routine to take all of the generated binary files and output a flame graph and table. With this, dev mode is done and I will begin working on live profiling.

Before you go…

Last week, our team members travelled to Hamburg, Germany, to present two tools at the 20th Conference on Detection of Intrusions and Malware & Vulnerability Assessment (DIMVA) Tools Arsenal. Check our blog.