OpenBSD’s small steps towards DTrace (a tale about DDB and CTF) - Jasper L  Adriaanse
Channel: EuroBSDcon
Date: 2019-10-16

Description:

This talk will be about the work that is going on in OpenBSD to develop a
dynamic tracing/profiling system, not unlike DTrace.
The road towards a fully working DTrace-like implementation is long and a lot
of that depends on having binaries annotated with CTF.

CTF is a converted subset of DWARF that can be embedded in all a wide range of binaries, including the kernel.

Throughout this presentation I will discuss the dynamic profiling part that has
been developed by Martin Pieuchot and I will go into the work that went into
adding support for inspecting kernel CTF-data with DDB. Lastly the status quo
will be reviewed as well as what pieces are still missing from the puzzle.

Speaker biography:

Jasper Lievisse Adriaanse is an OpenBSD developer from the Netherlands. He
joined the project in 2006 and has since been involved in many areas of the
tree, ranging from Octeon and GNOME to CTF.