peek

Peek is process monitoring application that allows linux users to inspect active processes on their system. It uses GNOME's glib and glibtop libraries to interface with the system and gtk as well as adwaita to construct a user interface.

This project was created to showcase my knowledge of the GTK library and explore an interest of the inner working of the linux operating system. Every operating system I have worked with (Windows, Linux & macOS) provided a visual of the active processes within the system and I thought it would be cool to figure out how this data is obtained and design my own interface for it. I discovered that reading process information is not as straight forward as you would think due to the way it is exposed by the kernel. On linux, the kernel exposes a virtual filesystem of process information that can be found at /proc (a window of sorts to the process activity inside the kernel). Previous experience suggested that I make the application event driven for updates to the active processes, but the API for monitoring directories and files for changes, inotify(7), does not allow for monitoring of virtual filesystems. This changed a portion of the application design to poll at a defined interval.

Obtaining the process data was made easy with the libgtop API's. I had spent several hours trying to work with the libprocps library, another process monitoring library (see readproc(3)), with limited success.

While researching how this project could be completed with the GTK library, I came across the repository for the current version of gnome-system-monitor. The work of the development team really helped me advance my understanding of the gobject, glib and gtk libraries when I got confused by the docs. The repository also provided calculations of CPU utilization that simplified my implementaion.

Building the Project

To build peek and try it for yourself, there are a couple dependencies!

Dependencies

• Meson build system
• libadwaita-1
• libgtop-2.0

Building & Installing

1. Navigate to the root of the project on your command line and run meson compile -C build to build the application (see commands for more options). The compiled binary can be found at build/src.
2. GSettings need to be installed before the application will run. The application can be installed with meson install -C build --no-rebuild
   • Alternatively, you can use the command meson install -C build to compile the sources and install the application with a single command.
3. To run the application, type peek on the command line or execute the binary at build/src.