In our previous article, we explored problems tracing and profiling the Linux kernel.
Today, we’d like to revisit these issues and talk about an interesting kernel tracer, LTTng, which was developed by Canadian programmer and researcher Mathieu Desnoyers. With this tool, we can receive information on events that occur in both the kernel and user spaces.
There are a number of tools for analyzing events at the kernel level: SystemTap, ktap, Sysdig, LTTNG, etc., and you can find plenty of detailed articles and materials about these on the web.
You’ll find much less information on Linux’s native mechanism for tracing system events and retrieving/analyzing troubleshooting information. That would be ftrace, the first tracing tool added to the kernel, and this is what we’ll be looking at today. Read more