latrace

[Petr Machata]

On Tue, Jul 29, 2008 at 09:27:21AM -0400, Chuck Anderson wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 29, 2008 at 06:34:02PM +0530, Rakesh Pandit wrote:
> > I too cannot see it in pkgdb nor can find any bugzilla review request.
> >
> > I will package it this weekend, if no one picks it up till then.
>
> How is it different than ltrace?

ltrace doesn't handle multi-threaded applications, but can trace
system calls.  It has extensible parameter formatter (dunno about
latrace).  latrace will have considerably better performance, because
there is no context switch involved in tracing, like is the case for
traditional breakpoint based tracing.

Other related project is dltrace, which like latrace uses LD_AUDIT
mechanism.  It resides in elfutils repository, which is unfortunate,
because fedorahosted doesn't (yet, hopefully) give read-only access
for some monotone-related reason.  Essentially no work is done on
dltrace.  I can upload srpm of latest greatest if there is an
interest, e.g. among latrace upstream.

Yet another related project is ftrace from the "frysk" suite.  That
uses traditional ptrace approach.  It handles threads, allows cherry
picking of symbols to trace, and is not limited to symbols with PLT
entries.  The downside is that it's a bulky monster written in java.

Personally I believe the way for future is to write all the tracing
and event-handling tools on top of / as part of systemtap, as soon as
it's capable of userspace tracing that is.  That would give Linux
single tool for analysis and debugging of everything from the kernel
up.  I don't really know much about systemtap though.

PM
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