Karim Yaghmour updates us on the Linux Trace Toolkit in this email excerpt …

A new patch, 2.5.7, is available for the Linux Trace Toolkit. The toolkits now supports five CPU architectures: i386, PPC, S/390, SuperH, and MIPS.

LTT provides for dynamic tracing of the Linux kernel. This type of toolset is fundamental when developing applications that require a clear understanding of the sequence of events that occur. It is, for instance, impossible to debug any form of interprocess communication using a conventional debugger. With a trace tool such as LTT, this becomes fairly easy.

Synchronization problem solving and performance measurement are the two broad categories where LTT is unique in its capabilities. In order to provide these capabilities, information must be collected at the kernel level during execution. Hence, trace statements are inserted at key points in the kernel to collect data.

Information is available detailing the complete mechanics of how information is recorded, committed and reused is covered in a paper I presented at the 2000 Usenix Annual Technical Conference entitled “Measuring and Characterizing System Behavior Using Kernel-Level Event Logging.” The complete paper can be downloaded here.

As said above, LTT does not add any code to the kernel when disabled at config time. Also, LTT has a very low impact (2.5%) on the system's behavior when activated. This impact has been studied in the Usenix paper.

LTT has been available for close to 3 years now and has seen many contributions from IBM, MontaVista, HP and Sony, to name a few. It is already part of a number of distributions, including MontaVista, Lineo and Debian, with more on the way.

In the past, many have shown interest and support for LTT's inclusion in the standard kernel tree. I won't fill this mail with names, but Alan Cox, for instance, is one of them.

The patch is available via ftp here.

 
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