[lttng-dev] "Hands-free" tracepoints using LD_PRELOAD

[Jonathan Rajotte-Julien]

Hi Brian,

On Tue, Jan 22, 2019 at 01:30:23PM -0500, Brian Rossa wrote:
>    4. Boilerplate that does the typical `log(...); auto return_val =
>    dlsym(...); log(...); return return_val;` gets generated.

As proposed by Francis, this is when you need to "generate" a corresponding
tracepoint definition and call the tracepoint() call with the appropriate
arguments.

As Francis demonstrated we do not see any reason for lttng-ust not to work here
given that you compile the libshim object correctly.

>    5. `log(...)` is a thin interface to spdlog
>    <https://github.com/gabime/spdlog> that handles `__attribute__`-based
>    setup and teardown of a logger.
> 
> So at the end of the day, the shim developer provides:
> 
>    - The whitelist of mangled names
>    - Implementations of struct "wrappers" that provide custom ostream
>    operators
>    - A map between type names and wrapper names
> 
> The machinery here seems fairly general-purpose, but I don't presume to be
> an expert. My implementation is somewhat error-prone, and my main hope in
> reaching out to the mailing list was that LTTng already had some of these
> steps better-implemented.

AFAIK, lttng does not have an equivalent.

> Step #2 is particularly problematic due to
> ambiguities in the mangling grammar, and will need support going forward to
> generalize well.

What is the status of this step in your project?

What are the problems that make your implementation "error-pone"?

Would you mind linking us to said project so we can have a look?

I would be interested in seeing at first lttng tracepoint used as Francis
demonstrated and see from there were this project can go.

> 
> I would be happy to contribute some or all of my implementation if it's
> something that the LTTng community would be interested in supporting and
> extending.

We are clearly open for discussion and helping you improve the project. I am not
so sure on supporting and extending it. Others might have a different opinion.


Cheers

--
Jonathan Rajotte-Julien
EfficiOS