I have been learning about the SFrame tracing effort and figured I should document the resources I have reviewed. Indu Bhagat has been actively involved in the development of SFrame. This is one of her talks giving an overview of the objectives of SFrame. The overall idea is that profiling tools (e.g. perf) usually need to generate stack traces. She lists some methods used to generate stack traces, e.g. using frame pointers, EH frame, last branch record (LBR), and other heuristics. Each of these have their own advantages and pitfalls. SFrame encodes the minimal info required for stack tracing.
I found additional videos by searching for sframe indu (there are lots of unrelated sframe results out there). This one by Steven and Indu covers potential issues that need to be addressed for JITted code.
Paste the lines below into a Dockerfile. See the Dockerfile reference for more information about Dockerfile commands.
FROM mcr.microsoft.com/cbl-mariner/base/core:2.0
Build the image by running docker build -t testimage . in the directory containing the Dockerfile. The output looks like this (hashes truncated to 16 characters):
It is sometimes essential to have the container run in detached mode, e.g. when you have a single command line interface available (e.g. via SSH) and don’t want to connect to the host again. Start the container using docker run then connect to it using docker attach.
docker run -dit --name mycontainer testimage
docker attach mycontainer
Other than the machine name, WSL’s Ubuntu 22.04.2 LTS has the same uname -a output as the docker container from the test image created above (on my x64 Windows 11 machine): Linux 9a13d5e98075 5.10.102.1-microsoft-standard-WSL2 #1 SMP Wed Mar 2 00:30:59 UTC 2022 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux.
Next, I created a new VM in Hyper-V and set the downloaded ISO as the boot disk. This was not sufficient to start the VM. Hyper-V failed to boot because the signed image’s hash is not allowed.
Setup is now straightforward. Here are the screenshots of the setup process. I selected the Server with GUI Base Environment with the Performance Tools and System Administration Tools add-ons.
Once setup completed, CentOS booted and prompted me to accept the license as shown in these screenshots.
This was my first time using CentOS in more than a decade so I was pleased that there wasn’t anything particularly jarring about the experience.
Of the many ways to transfer files to an Ubuntu guest on Hyper-V, running these PowerShell commands (as admin) suffices for a one-off file transfer. See 4 Ways to Transfer Files to a Linux Hyper-V Guest (altaro.com) for more details about this approach.
Yesterday I had a core dump from a Linux process that I wanted to specifically inspect in an Ubuntu VM. My host machine is a Windows 11 (10.0.22621.674) machine. The simple question of how to share files with my Ubuntu VM took me all over the map. Searching for hyper-v share files linux guest led me to Shared Folders over Hyper-V Ubuntu Guest (linuxhint.com). This had me enabling SMB 1.0/CIFS File Sharing Support (already had SMB Direct enabled) and Public folder sharing.
SMB Windows Features
Public Folder Sharing Settings
I then created an empty directory and turned on sharing on it as instructed. However, accessing it from Ubuntu turned out to be the problem. These are the suggested commands:
sudo apt install cifs-utils
mkdir ~/SharedFolder
sudo mount.cifs //<NAME OF YOUR PC>/<SHARED FOLDER NAME>
~/SharedFolder -o user=<YOUR WINDOWS USERNAME>
mount.cifs failed though.
saint@linuxvm:~$ sudo mount.cifs //DEVICENAME/virtual-machines
~/shared -o user=USERNAME
Password for USERNAME@//DEVICENAME/virtual-machines: ***
mount error(13): Permission denied
Refer to the mount.cifs(8) manual page (e.g. man mount.cifs) and kernel log messages (dmesg)
Click on Hyper-V’s Quick Create… command to start creating a VM. Select the latest Ubuntu LTS (22.04). Unfortunately, the only options available are the VM name and the network switch to use. Clicking on Create Virtual machine creates a VM on the primary/OS disk. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the Ubuntu 22.04 VM appeared to support enhanced session mode when Hyper-V asked for the screen resolution when connecting to it:
Connecting to Ubuntu VM
The enhanced session gives this xrdp login window:
xrdp Login Window
The window disappears when I enter my credentials and nothing happens for some time. I used the “Basic Session” toolbar button to switch back to the normal mode I’m used to. These are some of the errors I encounter:
Oh no! Something has gone wrong.
Internal Error Details
The error report points out that I have obsolete packages, among them gnome-shell (which crashed). I run sudo apt upgrade and says yes to the 368 upgrades (826 MB of archives). That is not sufficient to address this rdp bug so I stay in Basic Session mode for the rest of the time.
This leads me back to the PowerShell commands I used above. Lo and behold, they work this time! This is despite the fact that there don’t appear to be any processes displayed by ps -u root | grep hyper as described at 4 Ways to Transfer Files to a Linux Hyper-V Guest (altaro.com).
This is when I discover that I do not have enough space on the VM to expand my .gz file.
Inspecting Disk Usage
Unfortunately, the disk for the VM is only 12 GB (confirmed by launching Ubuntu and running out of space). Therefore, once the installation completes, expand the disk from 12 GB to a more reasonable size (e.g. 127 GB). If the default drive Quick Create used for the VM’s virtual disk does not have sufficient space, you will need to move the virtual hard disk to another drive then expand the partition in Ubuntu to use the whole virtual disk.
Open the virtual machine’s settings and select the VM’s Hard Drive. Click on the “New” button.
Select the disk type, e.g. “Dynamically Expanding“
Specify the name and location of the virtual hard disk file. This is where I selected a hard drive with lots of space for expansion for the VM.
In the Configure Disk section, select the option to “Copy the contents of the specified virtual hard disk” and select the virtual machine’s current .vhdx file.
Verify that all parameters are correctly set then click on Finish.
If the VM was still running, this error dialog will most likely be displayed.
The new hard disk will be created with the content of the currently
After starting the VM again, I still didn’t have enough space to decompress my .gz file.
As suggested on one of the Ubuntu forums, the key here is to install the VirtualBox guest additions. Having done so on my system, I ran these commands:
cd /media/VBOXADDITIONS_3.2.6_63112/
sudo ./VBoxLinuxAdditions-x86.run
Rebooting my virtual machine and maximizing the VirtualBox window left me running Ubuntu at my native screen resolution of 1680×1050 :).
Update: On VirtualBox 4.1.2, use the virtual machine’s Devices -> Install Guest Additions … menu item. The ISO Disc should be automatically mounted, and allowing autorun to continue should complete the installation. The Virtualbox website has more information on guest additions.
