Steven started working on the Linux kernel in 1998, and become a professional (paid) kernel developer in 2001. He's one of the original authors of the PREEMPT_RT patch, that turns Linux into a hard real-time OS, and is also the original creator and current maintainer of Ftrace, the official tracer of the Linux kernel. Steven is still very active in developing new features for Linux as well as getting involved in the community. Steven has given over 80 talks around the world, has been on various conference program committees and currently sits on the Linux Foundation's Technical Advisory Board (TAB).

Presentations

19x

Workshop: Introduction to the Linux kernel tracing libraries

This talk will describe the libtracefs library that is used to interact with the Linux ftrace tracing infrastructure. Controlling ftrace tracing is usually performed via the tracefs file system via echo and cat commands to the control files within it. This is awkward at best from doing the same from within an application. The libtracefs library and friends make it much easier to perform from your customized program. Useful examples of how to use the library will be given.

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17x

Debugging your Linux kernel with Ftrace

Whether you are a veteran kernel developer or someone that is just curious to what their kernel does, ftrace is the tool to use to see what your kernel is doing. Ftrace, is the official tracer tool of the Linux kernel, that does much more than mere tracing. You can graph into the functions that are called within any function in the kernel, live while it is running. You can see what functions call a specific function for a given load. This talk will give you a taste of the depth of what ftrace has available for you.

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