Back to the drawing board for utrace?

Posted Feb 1, 2010 11:59 UTC (Mon) by fuhchee (guest, #40059)
In reply to: Back to the drawing board for utrace? by sfink
Parent article: Back to the drawing board for utrace?

"But now I see that SystemTap is viewed as the bastard stepchild"

Heh. But the passive voice gives the opinion false authority.

"and I wonder if my investment into learning to use SystemTap was an expensive mistake."

You should explore the alternatives and use whatever works for you.
Listening to simple smears may well be self-defeating.

Back to the drawing board for utrace?

Posted Feb 1, 2010 13:36 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (1 responses)

WHICH ONE???

I'm in the same WTF situation. There are like 6 "tracing" solutions for Linux. Most of them with only a few lines of documentation (SystemTap at least is the most documented of them).

That's a complete SNAFU. Why can't we have one nice user-oriented solution?

SystemTap documentation

Posted Feb 1, 2010 14:29 UTC (Mon) by mjw (subscriber, #16740) [Link]

Yes, choice is such a drag. But none of them will go away soon. Especially not SystemTap which has always had a pretty loyal following and dedicated developers to make it work with whatever the kernel provides. Ultimately they will just share more and more features and they will all become more or less frontends to the same backend kernel features. Something like utrace and uprobes will ultimately get supported in the kernel and then the other tools will also get better user space tracking.

The SystemTap documentation can be found at:
http://sourceware.org/systemtap/SystemTap_Beginners_Guide/
http://sourceware.org/systemtap/langref/
http://sourceware.org/systemtap/examples/