API Trace & Retrace


= Copyright =

Copyright 2011 Jose Fonseca, Zack Rusin
Copyright 2008-2010 VMware, Inc.
All Rights Reserved.

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in
all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,
OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN
THE SOFTWARE.


= About =

This includes a set of tools for:
- trace OpenGL, D3D8, and D3D9 APIs calls to a file;
- retrace OpenGL calls from a file;
- visualize trace files, and inspect state.


= Status =

* It has not been tested with many applications. Bugs in less used features may
  cause application crashes.
* Direct3D 8 support is currently broken.
* No Direct3D retrace support


= Building from source =

Requirements common for all platforms:
* Python (requires version 2.6)
* CMake (tested with version 2.8)

Requirements to build the GUI (optional):
* Qt (tested with version 4.7)
* QJSON (tested with version 0.7.1)


== Linux ==

Build as:

 cmake -H. -Bbuild
 make -C build

You can also build the 32bit GL wrapper on 64bit distro with a multilib gcc by
doing:

 cmake -H. -Bbuild32 -DCMAKE_C_FLAGS=-m32 -DCMAKE_CXX_FLAGS=-m32 -DCMAKE_LINK_FLAGS=-m32
 make -C build32 glxtrace


== Windows ==

Additional requirements:

* Microsoft Visual Studio (tested with 2008 version) or MinGW (tested with gcc version 4.4)

* Microsoft DirectX SDK (tested with August 2007 release)

To build with Visual Studio invoke CMake as:

 cmake -G "Visual Studio 9 2008" -H. -Bbuild
 cmake --build build --config MinSizeRel

If you are building with GUI support (i.e, with QT and QJSON), it should detect
the official QT sdk automatically, but you will need to build QJSON yourself
and also set the QJSON_INCLUDE_DIR and QJSON_LIBRARIES variables in the
generated CMakeCache.txt when building apitrace and repeat the above sequence.
 
It's also possible to build for Windows on Linux with MinGW cross compilers.
See http://www.cmake.org/Wiki/CmakeMingw for detailed instructions.


= Usage =


== Linux ==

Run the application you want to trace as

 LD_PRELOAD=/path/to/glxtrace.so /path/to/application

and it will generate a trace named "application.trace" in the current
directory.  You can specify the written trace filename by setting the
TRACE_FILE envirnment variable before running.

View the trace with

 /path/to/tracedump application.trace | less -R

Replay the trace with

 /path/to/glretrace application.trace

Pass the -db option to use a double buffered visual.  Pass --help to glretrace
for more options.

Start the GUI as

  /path/to/qapitrace application.trace


The LD_PRELOAD mechanism should work with most applications.  There are some
applications, e.g., Unigine Heaven, which global function pointers with the
same name as GL entrypoints, living in a shared object that wasn't linked with
-Bsymbolic flag, so relocations to those globals function pointers get
overwritten with the address to our wrapper library, and the application will
segfault when trying to write to them.  For these applications it is possible
to trace by using glxtrace.so as an ordinary libGL.so and injecting into
LD_LIBRARY_PATH:

  ln -s glxtrace.so libGL.so
  ln -s glxtrace.so libGL.so.1
  ln -s glxtrace.so libGL.so.1.2
  export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/path/to/directory/where/glxtrace/is:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
  export TRACE_LIBGL=/path/to/real/libGL.so.1
  /path/to/application


== Windows ==

* Copy opengl32.dll, d3d8.dll, or d3d9.dll from build/wrappers directory to the
  directory with the application you want to trace.

* Run the application.

* View the trace with

 /path/to/tracedump application.trace

* Replay the trace with

 /path/to/glretrace application.trace


= Links =

* http://zrusin.blogspot.com/2011/04/apitrace.html
* http://jrfonseca.blogspot.com/2008/07/tracing-d3d-applications.html


== Direct3D ==

Open-source:
 * [http://www.mikoweb.eu/index.php?node=21 Proxy DLL]
   * [http://www.codeguru.com/cpp/g-m/directx/directx8/article.php/c11453/ Intercept Calls to DirectX with a Proxy DLL]
 * [http://graphics.stanford.edu/~mdfisher/D3D9Interceptor.html Direct3D 9 API Interceptor]

Closed-source:
 * [http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee417062.aspx Microsoft PIX]
   * [http://doc.51windows.net/Directx9_SDK/?url=/directx9_sdk/graphics/programmingguide/TutorialsAndSamplesAndToolsAndTips/Tools/D3DSpy.htm D3DSpy]: the predecessor of PIX
 * [http://developer.amd.com/gpu/PerfStudio/pages/APITraceWindow.aspx AMD GPU PerfStudio]


== OpenGL ==

Open-source:
 * [http://www.opengl.org/sdk/tools/BuGLe/ BuGLe]
 * [http://code.google.com/p/glintercept/ GLIntercept]
 * [https://gitorious.org/tracy tracy]: OpenGL ES and OpenVG trace, retrace, and state inspection

Closed-source:
 * [http://www.gremedy.com/products.php gDEBugger]
 * [http://cumbia.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/glsldevil/index.html glslDevil]
 * [http://developer.amd.com/gpu/PerfStudio/pages/APITraceWindow.aspx AMD GPU PerfStudio]