Collaboration Summit 2014

Ftrace is a very useful mechanism to trace what's happening inside the kernel. But it's not just for kernel developers. It also allows administrators to view the internals of this black box known as the kernel. The development of ftrace has not been stagnant, new features are continuously being added. For example, event triggers and multiple instances.

This tutorial will show the participants how to use general features of ftrace, as well as an extensive dive into the tricks of these new features by the creator of ftrace himself. Those that walk out of this tutorial will feel comfortable with how to see what a system call does, the path to a specific event in the kernel, how to stop the trace when things just don't go as expected.

If time permits, a use of the GUI interface KernelShark will also be taught.

The audience is for those that want a better understanding of the kernel that they run on. You do not need to be a kernel developer, or even a developer (although it may help). This tutorial is mostly aimed at system administrators, developers, and hobbist.


This tutorial (or presentation, if you wish) will help those that want to understand better the Linux kernel that they are running their applications on. This will give them more amunition to debug what's going wrong with their system. As ftrace is the official tracing tool of the Linux kernel, it is something that every system administrator should be familiar with.