Collaboration Summit 2013: LTTng-UST: Efficient System-Wide User-Space Tracing
Christian Babeux on 15 April 2013
In the past, much effort has been invested in high performance kernel tracing tools, but now focus in the tracing community seems to be shifting over to efficient user space application tracing. By providing joint kernel and user space tracing, developers can have deeper insights in their applications latencies. This presentation covers the ongoing efforts within the LTTng project to enhance system-wide tracing at the user space level. It discusses instrumentation sources such as Tracepoints, Uprobes, and SystemTAP SDT providers, along with their integration with LTTng. A brief overview of the latest and upcoming features of the user space tracer is presented. It also discusses ongoing efforts in the area of trace format and control protocol standardisation. Finally, our presentation includes challenging glibc-related issues encountered during LTTng-UST development, opening the discussion on how to improve and collaborate on user-space instrumentation.
The targeted audience is user space and kernel developers, those interested in tracing infrastructure, shared system libraries, and application instrumentation.