Kernel Instrumentation

Here is a listing of some instrumentation systems for the kernel:

TimePegs
Andrew Morton's system for measuring intervals between kernel events:

See http://www.zipworld.com.au/~akpm/linux/timepeg.txt

Patches at:

http://www.zip.com.au/~akpm/linux/index.html#timepegs

Printk Times
Produces printk's with extra time data on them. As of kernel 2.6.11 this is part of the mainline kernel enabled by CONFIG_PRINTK_TIME. Previous versions can add it via a very simple patch. It works for bootup time measurements, or other places where you can just jam in a printk or two.

See Printk Times

Kernel Function Instrumentation (KFI)
A system which uses a compiler flag to instrument most of the functions in the kernel. Timing data is recorded at each function entry and exit. The data can be extracted and displayed later with a command-line program.

The kernel portion of this is available in the CELF tree now.

Grep for CONFIG_KFI.

See the page Kernel Function Instrumentation page for some preliminary notes.

FIXTHIS - need to isolate this as a patch.

Linux Trace Toolkit
See Linux Trace Toolkit

Kernel Tracer (in IKD patch)
This is part of a general kernel tools package, maintained by Andrea Arcangeli.

See http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/andrea/ikd/README

The ktrace implementation is in the file kernel/debug/profiler.c It was originally written by Ingo Molnar, Richard Henderson and/or Andrea Arcangeli

It uses the compiler flag -pg to add profiling instrumentation to the kernel.

Function trace in KDB
Last year (Jan 2002) Jim Houston sent a patch to the kernel mailing list which provides support compiler-instrumented function calls.

See http://www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0201.3/0888.html

ftrace
Ftrace is a simple function tracer which initially came from the -rt patches but was mainlined in 2.6.27. Compiler profiling features are used to insert an instrumentation call that can be overwritten with a NOP sequence to ensure overhead is minimal with tracing disabled. There are a number of tracers in the kernel that use ftrace to trace high level events such as irq enabling/disabling preemption enabling/disabling, scheduler events and branch profiling.

The interface to access ftrace can be found in /debugfs/tracing, and is documented in Documentation/ftrace.txt.

SystemTap / Kprobes
SystemTap is a sophisticated kernel instrumentation tool that can be scripted with it's own language to gather information about a running kernel. It uses the Kprobes infrastructure to implement it's tracing.