Open Source Summit + ELC Europe 2019

One of the complaints about Linux is that there are more than one way to skin the tracing cat. There's ftrace, perf, BPF, bpftrace, LTTng, strace, gdb, and all sorts of ways to accomplish tracing within the Linux system. Some tracers focus on tracing the kernel while others focus on user space and each with their own file format.

Mathieu Desnoyers created babeltrace and the Common Trace Format (CTF) to solve the issue of different tracing formats. But this does not solve the issue of having multiple tools. If one wants to create a tool that requires the work of other tools, it will have a hard time executing them.

This brings up the Unified Tracing Platform (UTP). This effort is to take the functionality of all the tools and create libraries for them. This will allow any tool to utilize the features of the tools incorporated in the UTP. This talk will describe the efforts being made to accomplish the creation of UTP and how it will benefit the Linux ecosystem as a whole.