[lttng-dev] [RELEASE] LTTng modules 2.7.0 (Linux kernel tracer)

[Mathieu Desnoyers]

Hi,

I am proud to announce the 2.7.0 release of LTTng modules! LTTng
modules provide Linux kernel tracing capability to the LTTng 2.x
tracer toolset. I would like to remind everyone that *no* patching
of the Linux kernel is required whatsoever to use LTTng modules.
It has been like this since 2010, but for some reason we still
get this question.

Here is what is new and noteworthy in LTTng modules 2.7:

* Supports Linux kernels up to and including 4.3-rc2,

* New PID tracker: specify which process IDs you want to trace,
  (also available with the lttng-ust user-space tracer)

The new "track" and "untrack" commands allows the tracking of events associated
with specific PIDs, both in user space and kernel space.

For example, the following commands may be used to track all kernel events
of PID "1234":

$ lttng create my_session
$ lttng track --kernel --pid 1234
$ lttng enable-event --kernel --all
$ lttng start


* Filtering is now implemented for kernel tracing. It can be used
  through the same UI and API as with lttng-ust.

While LTTng-UST has provided support for event filtering for a long time,
it was not possible to perform kernel-side event filtering until now. As
of this version, kernel space filters can be used in the same way as user
space filters.

For instance, to trace only read() syscalls requesting more than 100 bytes:

$ lttng create my_session
$ lttng enable-event --kernel --syscall read --filter "count > 100"
$ lttng start


* Added $ctx.cpu_id context for filtering (note: also available in
  lttng-ust now),

How to use:

$ lttng create my_session
$ lttng enable-event --kernel --all --filter '$ctx.cpu_id<2'
$ lttng start


* New clock source plugin support. User-provide clock source
  override can be provided as a kernel module,

In the interest of keeping LTTng as unintrusive as possible, LTTng 2.7
introduces support for platform-specific plug-ins providing custom
clock sources.

Clock override plugins, which may be implemented as kernel modules may
prove useful in cases where direct hardware access to architecture-specific
clocks is available, and when it should be used in place of the Linux
kernel Monotonic clock.


* Wildcard support now available: can now specify e.g. 'sched_*'
  to enable all scheduler events. Similar UI/API as lttng-ust.

Support for wildcards in event names is another feature that has been brought
from the user space tracer to the kernel tracer. This means that groups of
kernel space events can be enabled at once using the wildcard notation.
Moreover, it makes it possible to enable events belonging to loadable modules
before said modules are loaded.

The tracing of all block device or scheduling events can be enabled using a
single command:

$ lttng enable-event --kernel 'block_*'
or
$ lttng enable-event --kernel 'sched_*'

Changelog since 2.7.0-rc2:

2015-09-24 LTTng modules 2.7.0
        * Fix: writeback instrumentation update for 4.3 Linux kernel
        * Fix: update sched wakeup instrumentation for 4.3 kernel
        * Fix: lttng-test build failure for kernels < 3.0

Project website: http://lttng.org
Documentation: http://lttng.org/docs
Download link: http://lttng.org/download

Enjoy this release!

Feedback is welcome,

Thanks,

Mathieu

-- 
Mathieu Desnoyers
EfficiOS Inc.
http://www.efficios.com