Abstract
This talk presents a new library for instrumentation of user-space applications: libside.
The purpose of the libside API/ABI is to allow a kernel tracer and many user-space tracers to attach to static and dynamic instrumentation of user-space applications.
The libside library expresses the instrumentation description as data (no generated code). Instrumentation arguments are passed on the stack as an array of typed items, along with a reference to the instrumentation description.
This library exposes a type system and a set of macros to help applications declare their instrumentation and insert instrumentation calls. It exposes APIs to kernel and user-space tracers so they can list and connect to the instrumentation, and conditionally enables instrumentation when at least one tracer is using it.
The type system includes support for statically known types and dynamic types. Nested structures, arrays, and variable-length arrays are supported.
This library learns from the user feedback about experience with LTTng-UST and Linux kernel tracepoints, and therefore it introduces significant changes (and vast simplifications) to the way instrumentation is done compared to LTTng-UST and Linux kernel tracepoints.
Biography
Mathieu Desnoyers main contributions are in the area of tracing (monitoring/performance analysis/debugging), scalability, and performance, both at the kernel and user-space levels. He maintains the LTTng project, the Userspace RCU library, as well as the Linux kernel membarrier and restartable sequences system calls. He works in close collaboration with the telecommunication industry, many Linux distributions, and with customers developing hardware scaling from small embedded devices to large-deployment servers. He is CEO and Software Engineer at EfficiOS.