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Peering into the Linux Kernel with Trace

Recently, I was working on a patch for a popular open-source project, and discovered that the test suite was failing intermittently. A closer look revealed t...

A closer look revealed that the last access time for some files in the project folder were changing unexpectedly, and this was causing a test to fail. Piping that into ripgrep revealed (within minutes) that my text editor had a background thread which was scanning the project files for changes, as part of its git integration. There are a couple different APIs which user programs can use to create kprobes; one of them is by writing some specially formatted data to a “magic” file called/sys/kernel/debug/tracing/kprobe_events.

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