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mevi

A memory visualizer for Linux 5.7+

Made for this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpnXaNkM9_M

Prerequisite

The vm.unprivileged_userfaultfd sysctl needs to be switched to 1:

$ sudo sysctl -w vm.unprivileged_userfaultfd=1

Doing this effectively "softens" your system to some attacks, so only do this in a VM or if you're reckless, but also, it seems less awful than running mevi + tracees as root. (No, giving the mevi binary CAP_PTRACE isn't enough).

You can technically run a bunch of apps with only user faults, but some fairly basic stuff like cat /hosts will fail with EFAULT without it, so, I'm not making it easy to go that route - if you really know what you're doing you can figure out where to pass the "user faults only" flag.

Usage

Install the mevi executable:

$ just install

(Or, without just, look into the Justfile for the cargo invocation)

To build & serve the frontend, you'll need to install support for the wasm target via rustup:

$ rustup target add wasm32-unknown-unknown

And to have trunk installed.

$ just serve

Open the frontend in your browser: http://localhost:8080

From another terminal, start the program you want to trace via mevi:

$ mevi PROGRAM ARGS

The frontend should connect to http://localhost:5001/stream.

If you're running this on a remote server, you'll need to forward both ports, with SSH for example:

ssh -L 5001:localhost:5001 -L 8080:localhost:8080 your-remote-host

License

This project is primarily distributed under the terms of both the MIT license and the Apache License (Version 2.0).

See LICENSE-APACHE and LICENSE-MIT for details.

FAQ / Troubleshooting

I get EPERM at some point

Did you skip past that sysctl note above?

The RSS numbers don't match up with htop/btop/procmaps etc.

mevi only tracks private+anonymous memory mappings. The discrepancy probably comes from mapped files, and to a lesser extent, shared memory.

I have a tiny program and everything goes by way too fast.

Try sleeping in your loops! Computers go fast noawadays and mevi tries not to slow your program down.

I have a multi-threaded program and it's all wrong

Yeah, sorry about that. userfaultfd events don't have all the info we need, and ptrace observes events out-of-order, so the view of multi-threaded programs gets out-of-sync with the kernel.

Can I run this on a big program?

Sure, Firefox works, with a non-snap version, and with sandbox disabled, like so (THIS IS DANGEROUS, THE SANDBOX IS THERE FOR A REASON).

First let's make sure you don't have firefox running in the background:

$ pkill firefox
# you can do it several times, until `pidof firefox` returns nothing

Then:

$ RUST_LOG=error RUST_BACKTRACE=1 MOZ_DISABLE_CONTENT_SANDBOX=1 MOZ_DISABLE_GMP_SANDBOX=1 MOZ_DISABLE_RDD_SANDBOX=1 MOZ_DISABLE_SOCKET_PROCESS_SANDBOX=1 mevi /usr/lib/firefox/firefox

Does this show backtraces?

No, but you can do that in your fork.

Does this allow travelling back in time?

No, but you can do that in your fork.

Does this have yet another, secret third feature?

Clearly not, but again, you can do that in your fork. This is a research project, I will not be maintaining it beyond "have it run in its current form".

If you want to spin this out into its own product, more power to you, but I'll have already moved on.

Why isn't this published on crates.io?

It's not a library and it's not usable without the frontend anyway. One day stable cargo will let us build wasm artifacts and ship them with the resulting binary, but that day is not today.

Why isn't this using eBPF?

I wanted to see how far I could take ptrace + userfaultfd. I'm interested in exploring eBPF later.