[Ksummit-2008-discuss] DTrace

[Christoph Hellwig]

On Sat, Jul 05, 2008 at 11:34:32PM +0530, K.Prasad wrote:
> > You can write probes in plain C, in fact I do this all the time.  what's
> > missing is a nice and easy to use channel to get the traces to userspace
> > and interpret them, and helper for poking at kernel data structures.
> >
> As you might be aware the "trace" interface which is part of the -mm
> tree was meant to satisfy such needs.

>From the interface POV it's a step in the right direction.  But to make
adhoc kprobe tracing viable for anyone but hardcore kernel hackers we
basically want a /debug/trace always availble so that the traces just
need to relay_printk() on it.  We also want some helpers to encode
complex strucures.  See the current printk on steroids discussion on
lkml which would be pretty helpful for it.