Tracing and Sampling for Real-Time Systems

Real-time systems have always been difficult to monitor and debug because of the realtime constraints which rule out any tool significantly impacting the system latency and performance. Tracing is often the most reliable tool available for studying real-time systems. In recent years, the real-time behavior of Linux systems has greatly improved and it is now possible to have latencies in the low microsecond range. In that context, tracers must ensure that their overhead is within that range, predictable and scales well to multiple cores.

Extract from Linux Low-Latency Tracing for Multicore Hard Real-Time Systems, R. Beamonte and M. Dagenais