Ktrace

ktrace

Written in	C[1]
Operating system	BSD Unix and Mac OS X
Available in	English
Type	Tracing

ktrace is a utility included with certain versions of BSD Unix and Mac OS X that traces kernel interaction with a program and dumps it to disk for the purposes of debugging and analysis. Traced kernel operations include system calls, name translations, signal processing, and I/O.^[2]

Trace files generated by ktrace (named ktrace.out by default) can be viewed in human-readable form by using the kdump utility.^[3]

Since Mac OS X Leopard, ktrace has been replaced by DTrace.^[4] The identically-named ktrace program in recent macOS versions does not have the same functions as this utility.

See also

• DTrace, Sun Microsystems's trace version, now running on OpenSolaris, FreeBSD, macOS, and Windows
• kdump (Linux), Linux kernel's crash dump mechanism, which internally uses kexec
• SystemTap
• trace on Linux, part of the Linux Trace Toolkit

References

1. "C source of ktrace utility in FreeBSD". cgit.freebsd.org. Retrieved 2024-03-07.
2. "ktrace(1) manpage". freebsd.org. 2012-05-31. Retrieved 2014-07-23.
3. "kdump(1) manpage". freebsd.org. 2014-03-28. Retrieved 2014-07-23.
4. "What happened to ktrace and kdump". discussions.apple.com. 2008-10-17.