Based on a handful of local hacky variations, this sort of trace
rendering is surprisingly useful for getting an understanding of how
different filesystem operations interact with the underlying
block-device.
At some point it would probably be good to reimplement this in a
compiled language. Parsing and tracking the trace output quickly
becomes a bottleneck with the amount of trace output the tests
generate.
Note also that since tracebd.py run on trace output, it can also be
used to debug logged block-device operations post-run.
This mostly involved futzing around with some of the less intuitive
parts of Unix's named-pipes behavior.
This is a bit important since the tests can quickly generate several
gigabytes of trace output.
