Re: Documenting kernel tracepoints

From: William Cohen
Date: Wed Mar 18 2009 - 15:19:30 EST


Ingo Molnar wrote:
> * William Cohen <wcohen@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>> There are a number of tracepoints in the latest kernels, but not
>> much documentation on the tracepoints. If a very recent version
>> of systemtap is available on the system, a list of the probe
>> points can be obtained with:
>>
>> stap -p2 -e 'probe kernel.trace("*") {exit()}'|sort
>>
>> However, this only provides the names. It doesn't provide
>> information about what information the probe point provides or the
>> arguments available at the probe point.
>>
>> Currently, a number of kernel functions and structures are
>> documented with embedded comments that are extracted with
>> kernel-doc. Seems like it would be reasonable to extend this to
>> support tracepoints. Any thoughts or comments about this approach?
>
> FYI, in the latest tracing tree (targeted for 2.6.30) all
> tracepoints show up under /debug/tracing/events/.
>
> Ingo

The /debug/tracing/events provides event names and information about the
available arguments. However, it doesn't provide the detail comparable to
kerneldoc embedded comments summarizing the tracepoint's purpose or what the
arguments are.

-Will
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