From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: fche@redhat.com (Frank Ch. Eigler)
Subject: Re: newbie question: tracing userspace call/return sequences
Date: Mon, 09 Jan 2017 12:20:48 -0500
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In-Reply-To: <CAPfS4ZwrYePYFoNtf7GOvMpJKABY8ZdCf+MB+xc+Ksa7ubRATQ@mail.gmail.com>
        (Christian Convey's message of "Thu, 5 Jan 2017 22:49:13 -0500")
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To: Christian Convey <christian.convey@gmail.com>
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christian.convey wrote:

> [...]
> Systemtap has an example script, "para-callgraph.stp", that reports
> the *sequence* of userspace function calls and returns made by an
> application.
>
> I'd like to perform that kind of analysis using perf tools rather than
> Systemtap, because I recently learned that Canonical considers
> Systemtap to be unsupported.  (E.g., it's pretty broken on Ubuntu
> 14.04.)
> [...]

For what it's worth, upstream systemtap versions work generally fine on
Ubuntus old & new.  Consider building your own, if Canonical's community
is not keeping it fresh on their own distro.

That said, consider also dyninst (C++ binary instrumentation API), or
perhaps even as a kernel-independent pure-userspace systemtap backend:
  % stap --runtime=dyninst

- FChE