Re: [PATCH 0/2] A kernel tracing interface

David Wilder
2007-09-18T19:54:47Z

Mathieu Desnoyers wrote:
> * Andrew Morton (akpm@linux-foundation.org) wrote:
>> On Tue, 18 Sep 2007 09:53:03 -0700 Vara Prasad <prasadav@us.ibm.com> wrote:
>>
>>> This is part of the effort by the SystemTap team to move pieces of the
>>> project that are generic to mainline.
>> Yeah. It seems to have been reviewed to death. Is it ready to
>> be applied yet?
>
> I would just say that this could be seen rather as a driver tracing
> interface than a general purpose tracing interface. Therefore, maybe the
> name is a bit misleading ? And yes, what is there is good, but it does
> not seem to be a replacement for a generic kernel tracer.
>
> My suggestions to turn it into a more suitable interface for a generic
> tracer are summarized in this email:
> http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/9/15/136
>
> Mathieu
>
Hi Mathieu
Sorry I did not comment earlier on your email describing a generic
tracer. I believe that "trace" and your generic tracer could complement
each other nicely. The trace primitives could be expanded in the future
to provide many of the features you described. However, some of the
features you describe are dependent on the format of the trace data
itself (for example filtering), thus belong in a layer on top of trace.

Dave.