Kernel Tracing With LTTng On Ubuntu Maverick

francis-giraldeau writes "Linux Tracing Toolkit (LTTng) provides high-performance kernel tracing for Linux. This is the killer app for system level debugging and performance tuning. It's now easier than ever to install, with packages released for Ubuntu Maverick. The short introduction to kernel tracing shows how to interpret a simple kernel trace and relate it to strace. I would like to ask Slashdot readers what they would expect as features for a kernel tracing analysis tool, because I'm starting my PhD on this topic and looking for ideas. Also, I wonder why LTTng is not mainline yet. Will Linus Torvalds see the light in 2011?"

Re:That it is safe to use in a production environm

[Dug]

Another go this time with a working link

http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/817-6223 [sun.com]

Re:Goal of the PhD work?

[francis-giraldeau]

Kernel tracing instrumentation is ready, now we need decent analysis tools. The problem is that there is so much data, that it's hard to interpret them. For the project, I have to come up with something that is new and better that what is already known. For example, we could get a better analysis than bootchart, or auto detect bottlenecks in a system (disk, CPU, memory, network, etc...). There are some work done to integrate userspace and kernel space tracing, virtual machine and host traces, dynamic and static trace points. For a distro, they could record a trace in background and send this information allong with the core dump when an application crash occur. That's all ideas!

Re:Some googling

[diegocg]

Well, ftrace has a lockless ring buffer. And eventually all the ring buffers are going to be unified [lwn.net]...

Re:Ubuntu Only?

[compudj]

So far, LTTng has been mainly integrated in embedded distros: WindRiver Linux, Montavista Linux and STLinux currently ship with LTTng. The interesting news that is particular about Ubuntu here is that, by installing the LTTng packages from PPA, it is now possible to easily deploy the LTTng kernel and userspace tracers on a desktop-oriented distribution.

Re:Goal of the PhD work?

[Lally Singh]

Hello, I couldn't find another way to contact you, so here we are.

I'm finishing up a PhD in scalability & performance analysis, and have done a lot of work in instrumentation. A userland instrumentation tool is part of my final research. Instrumentation is in a terrible, terrible state -- save a few points of light -- and I'm happy to see someone else in this area!!

So, as you're starting out, some tips:

1) If you haven't already done so, investigate dtrace. While available on Mac OS & FreeBSD, it's worth picking up a virtual machine image of opensolaris & playing with it there.

2) Pick up a copy of: R. Jain, "The Art of Computer Systems Performance Analysis: Techniques for Experimental Design, Measurement, Simulation, and Modeling," Wiley- Interscience, New York, NY, April 1991, ISBN:0471503361. It's my new Bible.

Good luck, and hit me up if you'd like to chat. For my email address, I'm [my first name].[my last name]@gmail.com

Cheers,
-ls