LF Live Mentorship Session: Tracing with Ftrace: Critical Tooling for Linux Development
Channel: The Linux Foundation
Date: 2021-06-04

Join us for Tracing with Ftrace: Critical Tooling for Linux Development with Steven Rostedt, Open Source Engineer at VMware.

Ftrace is the internal kernel infrastructure on how to connect callbacks to almost every function in the Linux kernel. The name "ftrace" also refers to a broader tracing infrastructure that implements not only function tracing, but trace events, dynamic events (from kprobes and uprobes), histograms, and many other tracers. The control of this tracing infrastructure is through the "tracefs" file system. The tracefs file system contains many files and directories all used to enable/disable tracing and retrieve its results.

This session will describe the various aspects of this tracing infrastructure, how tracefs is used and new libraries that exist to make it easier for any application to have access to the ftrace tracing infrastructure.