wachy

  A dynamic tracing profiler for Linux

Wachy provides a UI for interactive eBPF-based userspace performance debugging. For an overview, see the website: https://rubrikinc.github.io/wachy/. For background see the introductory blog post.

For more details see the guide.

Compatibility

Wachy requires:

1. Linux 4.6 or later kernel
2. Traced binary should be in a compiled language, and have debugging symbols

1 is due to availability of certain eBPF features, and 2 is due to the techniques used by wachy (eBPF uprobes and address to line number mappings from debugging symbols). Wachy also supports C++ symbol demangling - it has mostly been tested with C++ binaries. If you'd like demangling support for a new compiled language, please open an issue (note: despite being compiled, Go does not play well with eBPF). If you have ideas on how to do something similar on other platforms or with other unsupported languages, I'm interested in hearing it!

Wachy also currently only supports x86-64 binaries. If you are interested in other architectures, please open an issue.

Install

Download the latest version from the Releases page.

Wachy relies on bpftrace and the following shared libraries to run: libgcc_s, libncursesw. On ubuntu some of these may be installed by default, but to install them all you can run

sudo apt install bpftrace libgcc1 libncursesw5

If you see strange characters in the TUI, ensure your LANG is set correctly, e.g. before starting wachy, run

export LANG=en_US.UTF-8

Compiling

If you want to build wachy from source, it requires the following development packages: libiberty, ncurses, cmake. On ubuntu you can install them with

sudo apt install libiberty-dev libncurses5-dev libncursesw5-dev cmake

You also need Rust installed.

Then build with cargo

cargo build --release
target/release/wachy --help

Contribution

Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the work by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as per LICENSE.md, without any additional terms or conditions.

Contributions to this project must be accompanied by a Contributor License Agreement. We use https://cla-assistant.io to automate this process.