Rather than only showing system calls in the monitor, it would be a nice feature to monitor library calls as well. It would be an extremely useful supplement to backtraces when debugging a problem. To reduce verbosity, a filter can be added so that only calls into specified libraries are logged.
Yes. This is definatly a vaid functionality. One way we plan to address this is through something called tag sets. Basically you instrument your souce code, or the source code of a library with check points. These check points then cause the monitor to draw events when they are reached during execution. People can then share TagSets for library foo.so. Anyone have any other ways for monitoring library calls ?.. is a library call any different from a regular function call after the library has been loaded ?
> Anyone have any other ways for monitoring library calls ?.. is a library call > any different from a regular function call after the library has been loaded ? Identical. (well sometimes its a call through a function pointer, and sometimes through a "thunk").
This is done by ltrace (http://packages.debian.org/unstable/source/ltrace) thanks to cagney for the pointer. I couldnt quickly tell from the code but one possibility is that it monitors all library loads then sets breakpoints on all the functions of a library as soon as it is loaded.