[Lula] recommendations on code tracing tools

[al@danial.org]

On Sat, Apr 29, 2006 at 10:08:54AM -0700, Christopher Smith wrote:
> al at danial.org wrote:
> >Can anyone recommend a function tracing tool?  Ideally the tool
> >would be capable of working with externally called libraries 
> >too.     -- Al

> For dynamic tracing, as Steve mentioned, DTrace would be nice, but you
> need to run Solaris to take advantage of it. One trick we had
> demonstrated at SCALE this year was being able to use DTrace while
> running a Linux program in emulation inside Solaris (pretty amazing
> stuff really).

fancy stuff indeed; a bit more effort than I'm ready to undertake

> environment inside Solaris, and then do your tracing there. You can
> *sort* of use the output from gprof for this, or if you can't recompile
> (i.e. using externally called libraries) use oprofile, but the output
> probably won't be quite what you want (the data is probably there to get
> the data you want, but I suspect that's non-trivial).

Will Cohen, an oprofile developer, told me last week that since
oprofile does statistical sampling it would be unsuitable for
dynamic tracing; it could miss calls to functions with few
instructions.

> I also forgot to mention Intel's VTune. Costs money, but otherwise does
> the job. I think you can get a free trial.

Steve's comment on dtrace got me to searching for a Linux equivalent.
I came across two promising candidates:
Frysk http://sourceware.org/frysk/
Linux Tracing Toolkit http://www.opersys.com/LTT/
I'll start with Frysk.      -- Al
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