8

I was trying to use stap to trace a userspace executable, as advised by this answer: https://stackoverflow.com/a/324709/368507

To do this, kernel must have utrace patch, but i can't find any utrace patch for recent kernels.

The mailing list is closed, and many links on the official site are broken.

Does someone know where this project is going ? Is it dead ? Does that mean we cannot use stap anymore to trace executables on recent kernels ?

Thanks

Community
  • 1
  • 1
user368507
  • 1,388
  • 1
  • 13
  • 25
  • 1
    Take a look here: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel.utrace/4489, perhaps the repository mentioned there (https://github.com/utrace) is what you need? I also wonder if utrace patches finaly made their way to the mainline kernel. This would explain that they are not maintained separately anymore. Cannot confirm this though. – Eugene Aug 27 '12 at 07:33
  • 1
    See also the [notes for SystemTap 1.8](http://lwn.net/Articles/502773/), "Systemtap runtime changes" section. They briefly describe there what is needed to use SystemTap to trace a user-space executable. – Eugene Aug 27 '12 at 07:38

2 Answers2

8

The path of utrace upstream has been beset with many difficulties. However parts of it live on as described by this fine LWN article.

You will probably find it's easier to access this functionality via the "perf" suite of tools. After adding the probe events you can use the usual perf tool functionality to break down the results. See the commit message and the fine docs for more information.

stsquad
  • 5,712
  • 3
  • 36
  • 54
3

Utrace is indeed dead and is not in development anymore, it failed to get to the kernel. See "uprobes" instead it is available since 3.5+.

Anton
  • 976
  • 8
  • 9