global tracing

[Ananth N Mavinakayanahalli]

On Mon, Aug 04, 2008 at 04:49:21PM -0500, David Smith wrote:
> Roland McGrath wrote:

...

Roland, David,
 
> > 4. So, what's the plan?
> > 
> > I need folks who might use global tracing to answer these questions:
> > 
> >    a. Do we want it?
> 
> Yes.  Systemtap currently does "global" tracing now, in a manner similar
> to crash-suspend.c.  The code looks for global CLONE, EXEC, and DEATH
> events, so systemtap knows when threads come and go.  Once systemtap
> finds a process the user has told us he's interested in, it attaches
> some additional per-thread engine(s).
> 
> In the future, Frank has mentioned trying to do global memory map
> tracing, which would require global syscall tracing (or future global
> memory map tracing).

Answer to (a) is surely yes, but...

> >    b. Do we want it right now?
> 
> Yes.  If you need beta testers, let me know.

... wouldn't it be better to first push the base utrace upstream and add
this as a feature thereafter?

Ananth