Re: [PATCH 19/21] i386 Kprobes semaphore fix

[Ingo Molnar]

* Zachary Amsden <zach@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> >I believe user space kprobes are being worked on by some IBM India folks 
> >yes.
> 
> I'm convinced this is pointless.  What does it buy you over a ptrace 
> based debugger?  Why would you want extra code running in the kernel 
> that can be done perfectly well in userspace?

kprobes are not just for 'debuggers', they are also used for tracing and 
other dynamic instrumentation in projects like systemtap. Ptrace is way 
too slow and limited for things like that.

	Ingo
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