dtrace probes

[steveklabnik]

Issue by graydon
Wednesday May 29, 2013 at 23:45 GMT

For earlier discussion, see rust-lang/rust#6816

This issue was labelled with: A-instrumentation, A-libs, I-enhancement, P-low in the Rust repository

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I think rust should expose dtrace userland probes

Links:
http://www.solarisinternals.com/wiki/index.php/DTrace_Topics_USDT
https://wikis.oracle.com/display/DTrace/Statically+Defined+Tracing+for+User+Applications
https://wiki.freebsd.org/DTrace/userland

Some specific providers (including some dynamic):
https://github.com/chrisa/libusdt
https://github.com/chrisa/node-dtrace-provider
http://prefetch.net/projects/apache_modtrace/index.html
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=370906

Probably at least some for pervasive / standard-library actions:

• per-task CPU time, coroutine switches, lifecycle events
• heap allocations, GC, segmented stack growth
• message passing, IO ops / byte volumes
• conditions raised

Note that the "USDT" mechanism provides static probes whereas things like libusdt (above) provide an API for dynamically registering probes at runtime. This is probably important, possibly even a good place to start, though it's slightly more expensive; ideally of course we should be able to provide both.

See also #6810 concerning metrics. I think there's some potential design-informing between the two. Possibly libusdt as a reporting sink for metrics?

[tromey]

Linux has its own form of static probe: https://sourceware.org/systemtap/wiki/UserSpaceProbeImplementation. They are very low cost and various tools, like gdb and systemtap, already know how to access them.

[cuviper]

@tromey see my probe crate for SystemTap SDT support, and in theory it could support implementations for other platforms too. It needs asm! though, which makes it nightly-only.

[Fiedzia]

Its been a while, I looked at it recently and I can't see any way to get it working on stable.
My attempts is here: https://github.com/Fiedzia/rust-usdt. It works, but only on nightly due to being compiler plugin and using asm, and even nightly removed some features I had before (access to mir pass). The only way for now I'd see would be to integrate it with compiler.

[jonhoo]

With the up-and-coming support for eBPF-based program tracing using tools like bpftrace, it would be really cool to see this being picked up again. From this article, it looks like any kind of USDT probe would be immediately recognizable by eBPF-based tools. @cuviper can you comment any more on the state of libprobe since rust-lang/rust#14031?

[cuviper]

@jonhoo AFAIK my probe crate still works, but only on nightly for inline asm (rust-lang/rust#29722). I don't know how to implement this otherwise, but rumor from the recent all-hands meeting is that asm might now have a path toward stabilization.

[jonhoo]

I wonder whether libprobe also works on Linux with eBPF now... I suspect it should. Have you tried that at all?

[cuviper]

I haven't tried with eBPF, but it ought to work -- I implemented it the same way as sys/sdt.h.