Yep, thats the detailed story. A lot of Linuxes (especially current Ubuntu LTS) ship without those patches, though, which makes the whole exercise of compiling the kernel yourself (and maybe a debug image to go along with it) a tedious one, and probably not fit for a production environment.
Thats why I decided to focus on Linux > 3.5, which will be available with Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, where installing gets much easier if you know the right packages. I definitely wanted to make sure that people can start playing around with it in a few minutes.
Also, UPROBES are in my opinion one of the most interesting features to grab with strace. It allows you to easily combine detailed kernel-level tracing with tracing of your application.
(Not that I want to suggest that compiling your own kernel is hard to do, it just takes the fun out of "let's trace!")
Thats why I decided to focus on Linux > 3.5, which will be available with Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, where installing gets much easier if you know the right packages. I definitely wanted to make sure that people can start playing around with it in a few minutes.
Also, UPROBES are in my opinion one of the most interesting features to grab with strace. It allows you to easily combine detailed kernel-level tracing with tracing of your application.
(Not that I want to suggest that compiling your own kernel is hard to do, it just takes the fun out of "let's trace!")