[RELEASE] LTTng-UST 2.7.0 (Linux user-space tracer)

[Mathieu Desnoyers]

Hi,

I hereby announce the release of LTTng-UST 2.7.0. LTTng-UST is a
low-overhead application tracer for Linux. The library "liblttng-ust"
enables tracing of applications and libraries.

Here is what is new and noteworthy in LTTng-UST 2.7:


* tracelog() instrumentation facility. Excerpt from lttng-ust(3):

USAGE WITH TRACELOG
       If you want to migrate existing logging (info, errors, ...)   to  LTTng
       UST, you can use the tracelog() interface.  To do it, in a nutshell:

       1) #include <lttng/tracelog.h>

       2) /* in your code, use like a printf, with extra loglevel info. */
          tracelog(TRACE_INFO, "Message with integer %d", 1234);

       3) Link your program against liblttng-ust.so.

       4)  Enable  UST events when tracing with the following sequence of comâ
       mands
          from lttng-tools:

          lttng create
          lttng enable-event -u "lttng_ust_tracelog:*"
          lttng start
          [... run your program ...]
          lttng stop
          lttng view

       That's it!

       You can replace  the  enable-event  line  above  with  a  selection  of
       loglevels, e.g.:

          lttng enable-event -u -a --loglevel TRACE_INFO

       Which  will  gather  all  events  from  TRACE_INFO  and  more important
       loglevels.


* File-backed user space buffers

This feature allows mapping ring buffer into filesystems. Useful in combination
with pramfs or DAX+pmem (kernels 4.0+ for DAX and 4.1+ for pmem) to keep tracer
ring buffers around in persistent memory upon system reboot.

These buffers can be salvaged and converted to regular CTF traces using the
newly introduced lttng-crash utility to see the events that led to a crash.

How to use it:

[ mount dax-enabled FS backed by pmem block device... ]

$ lttng create my_session --shm-path=/path/to/dax/fs/
$ lttng enable-event --userspace --all
$ lttng start
[ do some UST tracing ]

[ run kexec to reboot, mount dax-enabled FS again... ]

# View or convert trace to CTF with lttng-crash:

$ lttng-crash /path/to/dax/fs/my_session*


* Process ID (PID) tracker

The new "track" and "untrack" commands allows the tracking of events associated
with specific PIDs, both in user space and kernel space.

For example, the following commands may be used to track all user space events
of PID "1234":
$ lttng create my_session
$ lttng track --userspace --pid 1234
$ lttng enable-event --userspace --all
$ lttng start


* Python logging support

Following in the footsteps of the Java Util Logging and Log4J logging backend
support, which were introduced as part of LTTng 2.4 and LTTng 2.6 respectively,
this new version adds support for the Python logging backend. This means that
logging statements emitted by the Python logging module can now be collected as
part of user space traces by enabling events from the "python" domain.

$ lttng create my_session
$ lttng enable-event --python --all
$ lttng start

The lttngust Python module is provided as part of LTTng-UST 2.7.
https://github.com/lttng/lttng-ust/tree/master/liblttng-ust-python-agent


* getcpu and clock plugin support.

In the interest of keeping LTTng as unintrusive as possible, LTTng 2.7
introduces support for platform-specific plug-ins providing custom
implementations of getcpu() (user space) and clock sources for both kernel and
user space tracers.

getcpu override plugins can prove useful in cases where direct hardware access
is available for architecture-specific registers storing the CPU number, and
where those should be used instead of the Linux kernel sched_getcpu()
vDSO/syscall.

Clock override plugins, which may be implemented as shared objects (user space)
or kernel modules (kernel space) may prove useful in cases where direct
hardware access to architecture-specific clocks is available, and when it should
be used in place of the Linux kernel Monotonic clock.


Project website: http://lttng.org
Documentation: http://lttng.org/docs
Download link: http://lttng.org/download

Changelog since 2.7.0-rc2:

2015-09-24 lttng-ust 2.7.0
        * Fix: don't dereference NULL pointers
        * Cleanup: Remove unused values
        * Fix: Value stored to 'has_waited' is never read
        * Fix: Argument with 'nonnull' attribute passed null
        * Cleanup: Unnecessary bit shift
        * Fix: sysconf() unchecked return value
        * doc: add Python example
        * Fix: Python agent: do not register twice to same port

Enjoy this release!

Thanks,

Mathieu

-- 
Mathieu Desnoyers
EfficiOS Inc.
http://www.efficios.com
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