All my favorite tracing tools
thume.ca
All my favorite tracing tools
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Re: All my favorite tracing tools
#2A pretty good overview of open source solutions in the space.
Missing out on one of the most useful areas for tracing which is time travel debugging. There are a number of interesting solutions there taking advantage of hardware trace, instrumentation, and deterministic replay. Even better when you get full visualization integration so you can do something like zoom in from a multiple minute trace onto a suspicious 200 ns function and then double click on it which will then backstep to that exact point in your program with the full reconstruction of memory at that time so you can debug from that point.
Re: All my favorite tracing tools
#3A pretty good overview of open source solutions in the space. Missing out on one of the most useful areas for tracing which is time travel debugging. There are a number of interesting solutions there taking advantage of hardware trace, instrumentation, and deterministic replay. Even better when you get full visualization integration so you can do something like zoom in from a multiple minute trace onto a suspicious 2…
Do you know of anyone who's built that kind of time travel debugging with a trace visualization in the open outside of Javascript? I know about rr and Pernosco but don't know of trace visualization integration for either of them, that would indeed be very cool. I definitely dream of having systems like this.
Re: All my favorite tracing tools
#4A pretty good overview of open source solutions in the space. Missing out on one of the most useful areas for tracing which is time travel debugging. There are a number of interesting solutions there taking advantage of hardware trace, instrumentation, and deterministic replay. Even better when you get full visualization integration so you can do something like zoom in from a multiple minute trace onto a suspicious 2…
Do you know of anyone who's built that kind of time travel debugging with a trace visualization in the open outside of Javascript? I know about rr and Pernosco but don't know of trace visualization integration for either of them, that would indeed be very cool. I definitely dream of having systems like this.
Green Hills Software TimeMachine + History for C and C++: https://www.ghs.com/products/MULTI_IDE.html
No particularly good publicly visible documentation of the functionality, but it does that and is a publicly purchasable product.
They also had TimeMachine + PathAnalyzer from the early 2000s which was a time travel debug with visualization solution, but they were only about as integrated as most of the solutions you see floating around today.
Re: All my favorite tracing tools
#5The author mentions dtrace in passing. If you're into "load bearing rants", check out bcantrill's recent rant on bpftrace silently losing events and why dtrace won't do that.
Re: All my favorite tracing tools
#6A pretty good overview of open source solutions in the space. Missing out on one of the most useful areas for tracing which is time travel debugging. There are a number of interesting solutions there taking advantage of hardware trace, instrumentation, and deterministic replay. Even better when you get full visualization integration so you can do something like zoom in from a multiple minute trace onto a suspicious 2…
Do you know of anyone who's built that kind of time travel debugging with a trace visualization in the open outside of Javascript? I know about rr and Pernosco but don't know of trace visualization integration for either of them, that would indeed be very cool. I definitely dream of having systems like this.
Tomorrow Corp does something like this in a variant of c++. But I am not sure it’s very open.
Re: All my favorite tracing tools
#7The author mentions dtrace in passing. If you're into "load bearing rants", check out bcantrill's recent rant on bpftrace silently losing events and why dtrace won't do that.
Dtrace is a generation behind eBPF. There's a reason why the tracing community has moved on to eBPF and is no longer interested in dtrace.
Re: All my favorite tracing tools
#8The author mentions dtrace in passing. If you're into "load bearing rants", check out bcantrill's recent rant on bpftrace silently losing events and why dtrace won't do that.
The "you can feel like lights flickering on" one?
Re: All my favorite tracing tools
#9The author mentions dtrace in passing. If you're into "load bearing rants", check out bcantrill's recent rant on bpftrace silently losing events and why dtrace won't do that.
I haven't actually used bpftrace myself, only BCC. I can totally imagine it being more janky than DTrace, BCC is pretty janky even if I also think it's cool. In my eBPF tracing framework I had to add special handling counters to alert you if it ever lost any events, plausible bpftrace didn't do that.
Re: All my favorite tracing tools
#10The author mentions dtrace in passing. If you're into "load bearing rants", check out bcantrill's recent rant on bpftrace silently losing events and why dtrace won't do that.
Dtrace is a generation behind eBPF. There's a reason why the tracing community has moved on to eBPF and is no longer interested in dtrace.
That's an absurd comment: eBPF and DTrace exist on orthogonal systems, and most using eBPF have never even used DTrace, let alone "moved on" from it. The systems are really quite different, and have different design centers; for the use case of instrumenting the system for purposes of understanding it, there are many regards in which eBPF remains behind DTrace -- one of which I elaborated on in the rant to which the parent is referring.[0]