Messages in this thread | | | Date | Fri, 24 Oct 2008 11:02:39 -0400 | From | "Frank Ch. Eigler" <> | Subject | Re: [PATCH 5/5] tracing/ftrace: Introduce the big kernel lock tracer |
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Hi -
On Fri, Oct 24, 2008 at 10:47:36AM -0400, Steven Rostedt wrote: > [...] > > > I would rather prefer to use an API that provides functions/objects > > > for most common scripting languages. > > > > That is an interesting idea. One possible problem is that the final > > complete script "program" needs to be translated to something that can > > run quickly and safely inside the kernel. Full python or perl runtime > > + libraries would have been almost certainly unbearable. > > Why can't the userspace application convert the script to something > easy that the kernel can handle?
That's what we do with the systemtap script, where kernel "handling" consists of "running the machine code".
> But have the user application interface be very simple, and perhaps > even use perl or python.
perl and python are pretty big procedural languages, and are not easily compiled down to compact & quickly executed machine code. (I take it no one is suggesting including a perl or python VM in the kernel.) Plus, debugger-flavoured event-handling programming style would not look nearly as compact in perl/python as in systemtap, which is small and domain-specific.
- FChE
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