Re: malloc() tracing in perf?

Peter Zijlstra
2009-08-06T11:28:32Z

On Thu, 2009-08-06 at 07:20 -0400, Frank Ch. Eigler wrote:
> Hi -
>
> On Thu, Aug 06, 2009 at 10:16:50AM +0200, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> > [...]
> > > But then it hit me, why can't I have kmemtrace + perf but for
> > > user-space? Something like the "Malloc Trace" shown here:
> > > [...]
>
> > I seem to have heard people are working on such a thing, but I can't
> > seem to find a single LKML post with 'uprobe' in the subject in the
> > past two years [...]
>
> That work is ongoing, and being discussed on utrace-devel@redhat.com,
> since it is a prerequisite.

Still hiding the discussion and the design never helped anybody.

You might think it ready and then post it to LKML only to have it ripped
apart -- have the discussion openly please.

> > Now doing probes on userspace is hard because you need to know more
> > about the userspace bits than a kernel really ought to be interested
> > in. [...] Anyway, like you say, it has uses (potentially very
> > powerful ones), Sun/Apple do it with Dtrace, Linux wants it but I
> > don't think we quite agreed on how to do it :-)
>
> While these deliberations are ongoing, you can use systemtap. Probing
> random places in userspace is about as casual as probing the kernel:

Right, but that still doesn't tell us anything on how you're doing that,
does it?