About the usefulness of kernel tracing

About the usefulness of kernel tracing

[Karim Yaghmour]

As I noted when discussing this with Andrew, we've been trying to get
LTT into the kernel for the past five (5) years. During that time we've
repeatedly encountered the same type of arguments for not including it,
and have provided proof as to why those arguments are not substantiated.
Lately I've at least got Andrew to admit that there were no maintenance
issues with the LTT trace statements (given that they've literally
remained unchanged ever since LTT was introduced.) In an effort to
address the issues regarding the usefulness of such a tool, I direct
those interested to this article on DTrace, a trace utility for Solaris:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/07/08/dtrace_user_take/

<rant>
With LTT and DProbes, we've basically got almost everything this tool
claims to provide, save that we would be even further down the road if
we did not need to spend so much time updating patches ...
</rant>

Karim
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