This practical guide walks you through Linux kernel stack backtracing, covering GDB installation, core dump analysis, handling corrupted stacks, and advanced tracing techniques using ftrace and eBPF, with step‑by‑step commands, code examples, and troubleshooting tips to pinpoint the root cause of crashes.
This article explains the technical principles behind Linux kernel tracing, covering static tracepoints and dynamic kprobes, demonstrating their use with ftrace and perf, and detailing the underlying macro implementations and low‑level mechanisms that make kernel source tracking possible.
This article explains how to locate and monitor kernel execution using IDE navigation, Linux tracing tools such as ftrace, perf, tracepoints, and kprobes, and dives into the underlying implementation details of static and dynamic tracing mechanisms.
This article explains the evolution of Linux kernel tracepoints, the design of the TRACE_EVENT() macro, its six parameters, and how to define, compile, and use tracepoints such as sched_switch for efficient, low‑overhead kernel tracing across various tracers.
The article explains what page faults are, why they become performance killers, and provides practical Linux tools and tuning steps—perf, vmstat, ftrace, swappiness, mlock, and swapoff—to quantify and mitigate both major and minor page faults.
This article explains what page faults are, why frequent faults degrade performance, how to measure them with Linux tools like perf, vmstat, and ftrace, and provides practical solutions ranging from memory upgrades to kernel parameter tuning.
This article provides a comprehensive guide to Linux's ftrace tool, explaining its purpose, various tracers, how to set up and use it via debugfs, detailed command examples, implementation details, practical use cases for performance tuning and debugging, and a comparison with other tracing utilities.
This article explains why Linux dominates server workloads, introduces the built‑in ftrace tracing framework, details its diverse tracers, lightweight static instrumentation and stable design, shows how to configure and use it via debugfs, and demonstrates performance tuning and fault diagnosis with real examples while comparing it to systemTap and LTTng.
This article explains how the built‑in Linux kernel tracer ftrace works, walks through its various tracers, shows how to configure and use it via debugfs, and demonstrates practical performance‑optimisation and fault‑diagnosis scenarios while comparing it with SystemTap and LTTng.
This article provides a comprehensive overview of Linux kernel tracing mechanisms—including probes, tracepoints, kprobes, uprobes, and ftrace—explaining their principles, implementation details, practical tools, and real‑world case studies for performance optimization, fault diagnosis, and security monitoring.
The article investigates why BPF LSM programs fail to load on aarch64 kernels, uses ftrace‑based tools such as bpftrace and trace‑cmd to trace kernel execution, discovers missing arch_prepare_bpf_trampoline support in 5.15 and 6.1, and shows that a patch merged into the mainline kernel restores functionality for upcoming releases.
This comprehensive guide explores Linux kernel debugging essentials, covering pseudo filesystems like procfs, sysfs, debugfs, relayfs, and advanced tracing tools such as ftrace, kprobe, systemtap, perf, KGTP, and LTTng, with practical commands and reference links.
The article details how Linux’s function‑graph ftrace tracer works on ARM64, explaining required kernel configs, how -pg inserts _mcount calls, the runtime patching of ftrace_graph_caller, register usage for argument passing, and return handling, and why shadow‑call‑stack must be disabled to enable precise call‑graph and timing analysis.
This article explains how Linux tracing tools such as kprobes, uprobes, tracepoints, eBPF, perf, ftrace, sysdig, SystemTap and LTTng fit together, describing their data sources, collection mechanisms and front‑ends, and offers guidance on choosing the right tool for low‑overhead debugging and performance analysis.
This article explains the fundamentals of Linux ftrace, details the event‑tracing mechanism and tracepoint macros, shows how to enable and filter events on ARM64 Android devices, and demonstrates a practical workflow for capturing low‑probability scheduling bugs in camera‑related processes.
This article explains the principles behind Android Systrace, details its implementation using ftrace, and shows how to add custom trace categories and parsers via Catapult to visualize kernel‑level information in Chrome's tracing UI.
