KTAP: A New Scripting Dynamic Tracing Tool For Linux

lwn.net

28 points·fafner··11 comments

Wow, this is awesome.

dtrace4linux still tanks my box. systemtap is more like systemthwack. We need this, folks. You might not be familiar with dtrace, but trust me, you need it.

What were you problems with SystemTap? I've only used it for some minor tracing but so far it actually worked quite nice. Except for the long compile time.

I have no personal experience with either, but this dtrace guy does not like SystemTap:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgmA48fILq8#1:13:00

The whole presentation is a nice and impressive dtrace showcase.

He's quite unspecific. He just says "it's bad" and that Red Hat is getting its ass kicked by Sun. Not to mention that the talk is from 2007.

Well, the final demo was a trace of a Python program (showing Python functions, not Python VM C functions) through the kernel (showing C Kernel functions) back (scheduling things) into Python. Can SystemTap do this (six years after this talk showcased it with dtrace)?

http://sourceware.org/systemtap/wiki/PythonMarkers

For some reason I can never load LWN stories, so: https://github.com/ktap/ktap

Could you explain to me (either here or corbet@lwn.net) what "I can never load LWN stories" means? Needless to say, we're not pleased with the idea that somebody is having trouble reading our stuff and would like to fix the problem. But to do that, we need to understand it...

I don't know. SeaMonkey and all my console tools can load it, but my firefox 20.0 install is being buggy. I have e-mailed you two tcpdump logs and more details.

At first glance, this looks like it shares much in common with DTrace--so why not DTrace?

It's an alternative to SystemTap or dtrace designed for use in embedded systems.

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