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Kernel Tracing With LTTng On Ubuntu Maverick

Posted by kdawson on from the truth-of-kernel dept.

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?"

3 of 88 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Crowd-sourcing a degree... by francis-giraldeau · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The reason is that I would like to make my research useful for tracing users, and I think the best way to do it is to ask people what they really need. I will give credits to those how helped my, why not? ;-)

  2. That it is safe to use in a production environment by Dug · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Not that much point having a tracing tool if an inexperienced admin cannot safely use it on a live system which has a problem.

    A problem already solved with DTrace on Solaris http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/817-6223

  3. Re:That it is safe to use in a production environm by Dug · · Score: 5, Interesting

    "Not that much point having a tracing tool if an inexperienced admin cannot safely use it on a live system which has a problem. "

    Right. Because everyone knows the best place to develop, debug, and profile code is on a production machine, and the person doing the development should be a system administrator, preferably with minimal experience.

    I would say many people do know that the best place to understand the performance of a system in production is in production. If the vendors support techs can give an admin commands to run and know that a typo here or there will not result in a panic then that is a very useful feature.