USB – Monitoring USB Traffic on Linux

monitoringusb

Kernel version: 2.6.31-22

I wish to monitor the USB traffic to and from a device. I've searched, but different sites seem to give different information and I'm confused.

Some sites suggest that I need to recompile the kernel, while others suggest that all I need to do is install the latest wireshark. Do I need to recompile?
Can someone suggest a website describing the most recent approach to USB sniffing?

Best Answer

You need to recompile kernel/load module. It is present in 2.6.32 (LTS) kernel - probably 2.6.31 as well. less /usr/src/linux/Documentation/usb/usbmon.txt. Format is "well known" and it acts like character devince. It can dump in text format as well.

Wireshark can provide live stream and/or read file from USB as far as GUI is concerned.

Related Solutions

USB Performance and Traffic Monitor – Tools and Tips

Since usbmon provides the length of each packet transferred, I would approach this by writing a quick program to parse the 0u file (which has data for all USB devices.) It would pick out the USB bus and device numbers, then keep a running total of the packet length field in both directions for each device.

This will then give you the amount of data transferred per device, in each direction. If you print it once a second you'll get a pretty good idea of each device's throughput. Note that it won't include any USB overhead, but if you compare the figures to a device that is able to saturate the available bandwidth you'll know whether you're getting close to the limit.

GPU Monitoring – How to Monitor GPU Usage with CUDA

For Nvidia GPUs there is a tool nvidia-smi that can show memory usage, GPU utilization and temperature of GPU. There also is a list of compute processes and few more options but my graphic card (GeForce 9600 GT) is not fully supported.

Sun May 13 20:02:49 2012       
+------------------------------------------------------+                       
| NVIDIA-SMI 3.295.40   Driver Version: 295.40         |                       
|-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
| Nb.  Name                     | Bus Id        Disp.  | Volatile ECC SB / DB |
| Fan   Temp   Power Usage /Cap | Memory Usage         | GPU Util. Compute M. |
|===============================+======================+======================|
| 0.  GeForce 9600 GT           | 0000:01:00.0  N/A    |       N/A        N/A |
|   0%   51 C  N/A   N/A /  N/A |  90%  459MB /  511MB |  N/A      Default    |
|-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------|
| Compute processes:                                               GPU Memory |
|  GPU  PID     Process name                                       Usage      |
|=============================================================================|
|  0.           Not Supported                                                 |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+

Best Answer

Related Solutions

USB Performance and Traffic Monitor – Tools and Tips

GPU Monitoring – How to Monitor GPU Usage with CUDA

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