Ftrace is the official tracer of the Linux kernel. It was added in 2008, and in 2009 came trace-cmd which was a command line tool that would make interaction with ftrace easier. Shortly after that, KernelShark was created as a GUI for trace-cmd interface. But as KernelShark and trace-cmd were mostly side projects, there wasn’t as much activity that they deserved. trace-cmd was updated more often, but KernelShark has suffered with bit-rot for some time. But all that has changed recently as VMware has active developers working on it.
KernelShark has been completely rewritten from scratch and version 1.0 is due to be released in August of 2018 (has already been released as of this talk). This will discuss what changed, how to use the new tool and what is coming in the future.
Steven Rostedt, VMware