Re: [Ksummit-discuss] [TECH TOPIC] Pulling away from the tracing ABI quicksands

[Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>]

On Thu, Jun 29, 2017 at 6:27 PM, Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org> wrote:
>
> Where I mentioned that he prefers a dynamic tracepoint. Is that what
> you mean? Because what he prefers doesn't exist yet. It's not kprobes
> nor eBPF. It is something we've been talking about implementing, and we
> were going to discuss the implementation at ksummit.
>
> Are you OK with that?

I'm not going to be at that discussion, and I don't think it should be
a ksummit thing, at least not the maintainership part. It's a
technical detail that should be discussed with the people who are
interested in that technical detail. Maybe a BOF?

But yes, I was talking about something very similar to what I think
Peter is talking about - the ability to attach a ebpf script to
kprobes and extract data dynamically. We've supported ebpf tracepoints
for years afaik, what is actually missing from using that for whatever
particular extension people want to use?

Wasn't that the whole promise (and premise) of using ebpf programs in
tracing? Exactly the ability to generate sane statistics and traces
dynamically. I know that was what I was sold on, even if it might not
actually have worked out that way.

                 Linus