Ktrace Explained

ktrace
Programming Language:	C^[1]
Operating System:	BSD Unix and Mac OS X
Language:	English
Genre:	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 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Since Mac OS X Leopard, ktrace has been replaced by DTrace.^[4] The identically-named ktrace program in recent macOS versions does not have the same functions as this utility.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

Notes and References

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