Hardware vendors now provide hardware tracing mechanisms which are currently partially supported by the mainline Linux kernel. Reaching an agreement amongst vendors on a set of common interfaces would be a good step towards improving hardware tracing support under Linux.
GDB supports saving tracing data in the Common Trace Format. By saving to a standard trace format, users are able to leverage existing tracing tools.
The goal of this project is to add support to the Linux kernel to provide a correlated time between the kernel instrumentation and userspace in order to have a comprehensive kernel instrumentation coverage which can be correlated to user level traces. By providing a common clock, tools such as Perf, Ftrace, SystemTAP and LTTng can benefit from this enhancement.
