Re: malloc() tracing in perf?

Peter Zijlstra
2009-08-06T12:59:53Z

On Thu, 2009-08-06 at 07:55 -0400, Frank Ch. Eigler wrote:
> Hi -
>
> On Thu, Aug 06, 2009 at 01:28:14PM +0200, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> > [...]
> > > 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.
>
> I guess "hiding" is a matter of opinion.

Yeah in plain sight where nobody looks, really I thought the idea was to
get utrace upstream, this means posting to linux-kernel. Going on LKML
posts I'd say the utrace project was dead. Same goes for uprobe.

I've told this before and I'll say it again, post to LKML.

> > > 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?
>
> Since you asked... the probe process("/lib64/libc.so.6") points
> systemtap to a shared library file, whose symbol table & debug data
> gives us information about what functions & parameters are available.
> Among other things, we record a shared-library base-relative address
> for the function.
>
> At run time, we monitor the entire system (or just a given process if
> -x PID/-c CMD was specified) to see when that shared library gets
> loaded. (This in turn is done with a utrace-based hook of the mmap
> syscall - see "task_finder" in our sources).

Does this also iterate the already existing tasks to find if it was
already mmap()ed?

> This overview skims over issues related to return probes, tracing
> buffer manipulations, and much other stuff.

Right, so you basically read the (dwarf2) debug info for a particular
lib/symbol and generate a kernel module that knows about that and then
insert that into the kernel to act as a uprobe handler?

Uprobe will then do the code rewrite on mmap() time to insert a trap
much like kprobe does? What if its a JITed code section and the JIT
rewrites it? Will uprobes detect that?

> All the code for this is hidden in plain sight in every systemtap
> release, so please feel free to refer to that and/or ask more detailed
> questions.

I thought the goal was to get stuff upstream, but if you want to
continue living in la-la land and not bother with upstream Linux then so
be it I guess :-(