Julia Evans put together an extended blog post on “Linux tracing systems & how they fit together”.
The thing I learned last week that helped me really understand was – you can split linux tracing systems into data sources (where the tracing data comes from), mechanisms for collecting data for those sources (like “ftrace”) and tracing frontends (the tool you actually interact with to collect/analyse data). The overall picture is still kind of fragmented and confusing, but it’s at least a more approachable fragmented/confusing system.
Even better, she made a nice illustrated ’zine to go with.
Wrote a really quick zine out of the linux tracing tools post from yesterday. It’s not super fancy but here it is. It’s 12 pages, there’s a print version & a version to read on your computer as usual.