User-space tracing on ARM

[Frank Ch. Eigler]

Hi, Fred -

> [...]  Is anyone probing user-space on ARM with systemtap ? I asked
> the question in the context of Linaro organization and I did not get
> anwers :-(

Due to the unfortunate lack of a utrace | uprobes port for ARM,
systemtap's support for userspace on your platform is still very
limited.

The medium-term way forward would appear to be porting the proposed
ibm uprobes lkml patches to ARM, and waiting/helping till systemtap is
able to make use of those.

> - how does systemtap compare to other tools for user-space ? 
> [...]

For joint kernel+userspace dynamic+static tracing+probing, systemtap
has been the only available alternative.  For different subsets of
functionality, with different performance/portability tradeoffs, the
other tools may suit well.  Perhaps we should add a few more
rows/columns to the (increasingly misnamed) comparison page [1].

[1] http://sourceware.org/systemtap/wiki/SystemtapDtraceComparison

- FChE