Chapter 15
KUtrace: Linux Kernel Patches
The KUtrace software to capture and timestamp every transition between user-mode and kernel-mode execution is built from a set of Linux kernel patches, a runtime loadable kernel module, a user-mode control library, and various postprocessing programs. In this chapter, we look at the overall tracing design and the kernel patches. In the next chapter, we will look at the companion loadable module code that the patches call. The implementation mechanism is all isolated in this module; just the hooks are in patched kernel files.
The tracing code fills an in-memory reserved kernel buffer organized as multiple fixed-size blocks, each containing multiple individual trace entries. The entire buffer is allocated ...
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