This is the SUBTERFUGUE project home page. SUBTERFUGUE is a framework for observing and playing with the reality of software; it's a foundation for building tools to do tracing, sandboxing, and many other things. You could think of it as "strace meets expect."

Features

• simple interface for writing tools
• can follow, rewrite, and annul system calls
• can follow, rewrite, and annul signals (with limits)
• follows whole process trees
• can follow across fork, vfork, and clone
• has a fairly good wait4 emulation
• can follow job control (with limits)

Documentation

• a description with more detail on SUBTERFUGUE's many features and limitations
• a tutorial, which walks through the steps of using and writing new tricks for SUBTERFUGUE
• the motivation behind SUBTERFUGUE (not yet written)
• a FAQ list
• some screenshots of SUBTERFUGUE in action

Trying it out

You can download the latest version of SUBTERFUGUE from the SUBTERFUGUE project page at SourceForge.

SUBTERFUGUE is written in Python, except for an included Python module, python-ptrace, which is written in C. Python 1.5.2 is recommended, and you'll need gcc and make to build the python-ptrace module. SUBTERFUGUE currently runs only under Linux 2.3.39-pre1 or later. A kernel patch is required for kernels before 2.3.99-pre1. For later kernels, a patch is recommended, but SUBTERFUGUE will run (more slowly) without it, using the --waitchannelhack flag.

SUBTERFUGUE is pretty alpha. You definitely shouldn't use it in a production environment yet. I'd probably wait a bit longer to release it into the wild, but I'm hoping to convince Linus to incorporate the above patch for 2.4.

Please report bugs to subterfugue-dev. Comments, criticism, and code are also welcome, not to mention donations of excess cash (or excessive donations of cash).

If you'd like to get announcements of new releases, add yourself to the subterfugue-announce list. If you'd like to follow along or get involved, add yourself to subterfugue-dev. CVS commits are posted to subterfugue-cvs-commits. One good place to start would be to try writing some tricks of your own; another would be to work on squashing bugs (which, surprisingly enough, still exist). There's plenty of other stuff, too--just ask!

License

SUBTERFUGUE is (and always will be) available under the GNU Public License.

Thanks

I'd like to thank the guys at SourceForge for providing an über-cool hosting environment for SUBTERFUGUE. I'd also like to thank VA Linux and Red Hat for their generosity (read "directed shares"), which has allowed me to spend more of my time on this project.

Mike Coleman
<mkc@subterfugue.org>, <mkc@users.sourceforge.net>