We are pleased to announce that the Tracing Microconference has been accepted into the 2019 Linux Plumbers Conference! Its return to Linux Plumbers shows that tracing is not finished in Linux, and there continue to be challenging problems to solve.

There’s a broad list of ways to perform Tracing in Linux. From the original mainline Linux tracer, Ftrace, to profiling tools like perf, more complex customized tracing like BPF and out-of-tree tracers like LTTng, systemtap, and Dtrace. Part of the trouble with tracing within Linux is that there is so much to choose from. Each of these have their own audience, but there is a lot of overlap. This year’s theme is to find those common areas and combine them into common utilities.

There is also a lot of new work that is happening and discussions between top maintainers will help keep everyone in sync, and provide good direction for the future.

Expected topics include:

• bpf tracing – Anything to do with BPF and tracing combined
• libtrace – Making libraries from our tools
• Packaging – Packaging these libraries
• babeltrace – Anything that we need to do to get all tracers talking to each other
• Those pesky tracepoints – How to get what we want from places where trace events are taboo
• Changing tracepoints – Without breaking userspace
• Function tracing – Modification of current implementation
• Rewriting of the Function Graph tracer – Can kretprobes and function graph tracer merge as one
• Histogram and synthetic tracepoints – Making a better interface that is more intuitive to use

Come and join us and not only learn but help direct the future progress of tracing inside the Linux kernel and beyond!

Here is a list of proposed tracing topics. For Linux Plumbers 2019, new topics for microconferences can be submitted via the Call for Proposals (CfP) interface. Please visit the CfP page for more information.

We hope to see you there!