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DTrace provides a facility for developers to define customized probes in kernel modules.
These static probes appear as additional probes of the sdt provider and
impose little to no overhead if the sdt module is not loaded. (For x86_64,
the overhead is a single-byte NOP followed by a 4-byte NOP.) This chapter provides a full
example of how to define and use static probes in a kernel module.
The general principles for naming probes and choosing insertion points are the same for
kernel modules as for user-space applications. You should define probes that have a semantic
meaning that is readily understood by your DTrace user community. Typically, you might name
probes for the routine in which you place them and their position in that routine. For
example, if your probes provide information about data values on entry to or return from a
routine named foo, you might name them foo-entry and
foo-return. The data values returned by such probes could present the
routine as a black box, rather than return intermediate values from the
internal implementation of the module. To gather data from deeper inside a module, you might
insert additional probes with names such as foo-stage1 or
foo-post-hardware-init.
In one respect, using static probes with kernel modules can actually be simpler than for
user-space applications. You do not need to modify the build files unless you want to
conditionally compile a module to include the probes. Inserting the probes in the source code
is slightly more complex as you cannot use dtrace -h to generate the probe
macros. However, using a DTRACE_PROBE macro to insert a probe is a
relatively simple change to make to the source code.
You can insert sdt static probes in any Oracle Linux kernel module for
which you have the source files and the necessary build infrastructure. However, DTrace
supports statically defined tracing of 64-bit kernel modules only.
For more information about the sdt provider, see Section 11.4, “sdt provider”.
For an introduction to the concepts of statically defined tracing as applied to user-space applications, see Chapter 13, Statically Defined Tracing of User Applications.