Saturday 7 December 2013

dtrace, ptrace, strace, xtrace, fatrace, ...

Been working on my ptrace tool (very similar to strace, but does
more...hopefully!). Of course, there are many tracing tools out
there, but I was intrigued, when I decided to try "ftrace", which
wasnt on my system, and got the following recommendations...


/home/fox/src/trace@dixxy: ftrace
No command 'ftrace' found, did you mean:
Command 'fstrace' from package 'openafs-client' (universe)
Command 'mftrace' from package 'mftrace' (universe)
Command 'dtrace' from package 'systemtap-sdt-dev' (universe)
Command 'itrace' from package 'irpas' (multiverse)
Command 'ltrace' from package 'ltrace' (main)
Command 'fatrace' from package 'fatrace' (universe)
Command 'strace' from package 'strace' (main)
Command 'btrace' from package 'blktrace' (universe)
Command 'rtrace' from package 'radiance' (universe)
Command 'xtrace' from package 'xtrace' (universe)
Command 'mtrace' from package 'libc-dev-bin' (main)
ftrace: command not found


Ok - so there are a lot, what do they do? I havent
tried all of them, but I tried a few:

xtrace - an X11 tracing utility.

fatrace - a "who is writing to the disk" utility. Very nice. It
uses system calls (fanotify_init and fanotify_mark) to access this
data - I wasnt aware of these syscalls, but now I am.

ltrace - is a tool to monitor shared library calls. dtrace
can do this, but ltrace is nicer/easier for the simple scenarios.
(my ptrace can do this too, but it needs more work to verify it
is still functional).

Then theres dtrace (systemtap-sdt-dev) - from the man page,
just seems to be a tool to define systemtap equivalents
to DTrace static probes.




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