
KTAP: A New Scripting Dynamic Tracing Tool For Linux - fafner
https://lwn.net/Articles/551253/
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undoware
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.

~~~
fafner
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.

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qznc
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.

~~~
fafner
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.

~~~
qznc
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)?

~~~
fafner
<http://sourceware.org/systemtap/wiki/PythonMarkers>

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

~~~
corbet
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...

~~~
peterwwillis
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.

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

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

