This post summarizes the progress in the twelfth week of the coding period. Last week a new version of pcp with pcp-mpstat was released. This week, work on the third objective of GSoC has been started.

htop

htop is an console based interactive version of popular linux tool top. htop has some very nice features like both direction scrolling, faster startup time etc. Although not much documentation is available about the source, but the code is itself written in a very modular way, allowing people to extend htop to their platform.

Adding pcp platfrom

Ryan suggested having a duplicate of unsupportedplatform as pcp and make changes into this source accordingly. So I followed this way and we have a ‘Not Working’ pcp platfrom into htop.

./configure && make && make install

Since we have a pcp platform included it was the time to test this platform, next step was to allow configure script to build itselt for pcp platform. I had used configure and make scripts number of times but modifying them was a first time. I was able to change configure.ac file but did consider updating the Makefile.am resulting into some errors. Ryan sent the PR with the desired changes in these script and we are able to build htop for pcp platform.

Adding metric repository

From our past experience with pcp-mpstat and pcp-pidstat, I tried to implement metric repository code which would be responsible for providing all required metric values. After having a discussion with ryan, we come up with the decision that metric_repository type architecture would not be feasible for htop and we’ll have to think about it later. We just need to implement a working feature of htop for pcp platfrom and we would refine them afterwards.

That’s all folks.