Why trace the kernel? [LWN.net]

Why trace the kernel?

Posted Jul 30, 2008 1:05 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: Why trace the kernel? by oak
Parent article: Tracing: no shortage of options

Regarding your ltrace comments, yes, it's a kludge. Thankfully glibc 
provides LD_AUDIT which is much more capable, because the dynamic linker 
really can tell what dynamic calls are being made. It would be even better 
if there was even the slightest hint of documentation about it, but 
thankfully we don't need that as Jiri Olsa has done it for us: 
<http://latrace.sf.net/>.

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Why trace the kernel?

Posted Jul 30, 2008 14:37 UTC (Wed) by oak (guest, #2786) [Link] (1 responses)

Thanks, this looks useful!

(Although dynamic linker based things are faster than ptrace, they require 
restarting the monitored process to enabled the tracing so they are not 
very suitable for ad-hoc system monitoring.)

Why trace the kernel?

Posted Jul 30, 2008 22:22 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

That's true. (Particularly true in this case, where quite a bit of the 
magic is handled at ld.so startup time.)