thoughts

[Mathieu Desnoyers]

Jose R. Santos <jrsantos@austin.ibm.com> :

> Is the creation of a trace probe something thats being worked on?  My
> teams is currently in the process of creating a trace tool using
> SystemTap and one of the requirements that the tool need is that for
> every probe inserted, the cpu, pid, tid and a time-stamp (jiffies?) be
> returned as well as some additional information that would be probe
> specific.  While it is possible to grab all these using SystemTap, I
> wonder if it would make more sense to have a special trace probe that
> does all this and then have SystemTap exploit this.
> 
> Any thoughts?

We are working on a kernel tracing tool that seems to share a lot with the
trace tool you are talking about.

We have a kernel tracer (LTTng) and a trace viewer (LTTV) which are based on
static kernel instrumentation.

One of the main advantages of the LTTng tracing code is that it is fast. It
seems to be a downside of SystemTAP. We use a code generator that takes an event
description to generate the tracing code that can be inserted through module
loading.

I think that you might be interested to have a look at it. Here is the website :
http://ltt.polymtl.ca


Mathieu


Mahtieu Desnoyers
Computer Engineering Master Student
École Polytechnique de Montréal


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