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LTTng faces barriers to contributing tracing work to the mainline kernel

lwn.net by jake Editor score 7/10

LTTng’s creator says he has found no path to contribute the 21-year-old tracing framework—or features from it—to the mainline kernel, despite efforts to collaborate with ftrace and perf. The case highlights the governance and integration challenges facing long-lived systems tooling.

What

- LTTng is a 21-year-old GPLv2 tracing framework whose creator is seeking a route to mainline kernel contributions.

How

- Feedback from tracing projects, including ftrace and perf, has not shown a path to contribute the framework or its features.

Why it matters

- Kernel tracing engineers face an unresolved collaboration path for integrating out-of-tree tracing work.

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