Re: [RFC PATCH v2] Tracepoint: add exec tracepoint

[David Smith <dsmith@redhat.com>]

On 11/07/2011 06:56 AM, Peter Zijlstra wrote:

> On Thu, 2011-11-03 at 10:59 -0500, David Smith wrote:
>> Added general purpose exec tracepoint.  The 'bprm' argument gives
>> details of the exec.

>>

> This 'changelog' if one can call it that, is completely devoid of
> rationale, why should we care and why should we merge.


Sorry for being too terse.

Exec is an important major event in the life of a task (like fork or
exit).  If you want to watch a task start up, when it gets exec'ed is a
good place to start.  With the addition of this tracepoint, we can
monitor exec's and get a better picture of system activity in general.
This will also enable better process tracking, allowing you to answer
questions like "what process keeps starting up process X?".

This tracepoint can also be useful in ftrace filtering (i.e. starting or
stopping filtering when exec is called)

-- 
David Smith
dsmith@redhat.com
Red Hat
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