A SystemTap update [LWN.net]

A SystemTap update

Posted Feb 3, 2009 22:41 UTC (Tue) by oak (subscriber, #2786)
In reply to: A SystemTap update by jejb
Parent article: A SystemTap update

> Well, this would be the classic illustration of the problems systemtap
faces. Nothing on the above laundry list is impossible even if the kernel
merely controls the traced process and lets userspace poke at it ... that,
after all, is how gdb works.

As to why to do it in kernel... Doing it from user space is just too slow.
Try e.g. get backtraces to mallocs through ptrace and you notice how
infeasible this is from user-space (at least through the interface ptrace
offers). With the modern desktop apps that use malloc pretty heavily, the
programs become unusable slow (in addition to their usability, also their
functionality may suffer if they use timeouts for responses etc).

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