The allfrom.d dscript can be used to display all function entry/exits caused by a function call. When call graphs are deep, or long, a visual representation is very helpful to understand the flow as well as how much time each function consumed. The output displayed is inspired by Roch's CallStackAnalyzer which was in turn inspired by the work on vftrace by Jan Boerhout.

I wrote a simple ruby script to post process the allfrom.d output and generate a SVG image. The advantage of using SVG is that you can use javascript to provide added functionality. For example, you can hover your mouse over any block to see the name of the function and its elapsed time. Similarly, you could add support for Zoom and Pan

Unfortunately, I am having problems with blogs.sun.com serving svg files with the right mime type. So I have included a png image below. You can save the svg files somewhere on your computer and view them using Firefox.

A sample for the connect(3socket) is shown below. The input file used to generate it is available here. The width of each box indicates how long the function took. Y axis indicates call depth.

If you are interested, you can also check out

• zfs_write
• connect
• A simple read

To use the scripts to generate your own call stacks, download the following two [ 1, 2] ruby source files. For example, to generate the above callgraph, you can use


Note that the script does not work reliably for asynchronous function calls, or cases where the thread changes CPU. If there is sufficient interest, I might be tempted to add those in