I ran a little experiment whose results surprised me.  Using a non-tracing 
group user account, I first made sure I had a root lttng-sessiond running and a 
user-space lttng-sessiond.  In the first I set up a trace for some kernel 
events plus all user-space events.  In the second I set up a trace for all 
user-space events only.  Both traces were started, then the 
lttng-ust/doc/examples/easy-ust/sample demo was run to generate the user-space 
events.  Then both traces were stopped and destroyed.

   I noted there were three lttng-consumerd daemons: one in user-space, the 
other two owned by root.  Presumably one is servicing the kernel events while 
the other is servicing the user-space events.  (Question: If there were several 
users active at once, would there be several root user-space lttng-consumerd 
daemons or still just one?)

   As expected, both traces show the sample user-space events (with no losses, 
it turns out).  What surprised me, however, is that the pairs of events were 
not in synch. Since they're all coming out of the same trace provider, I would 
expect the time-stamp to be issued once (by the tracepoint provider), and then 
two copies of the event to go into the two trace buffers for eventual storage.  
Could it be that the tracepoint provider instead issues two separate events, 
one for each of its clients?  (For the record, the pairs of events were out of 
synch by at least 4187 ns (670 times out of 100 000), and as much as 3 326 405 
ns (once); in 93% of the time root event lags after the user-space event)

   This seems problematic to me, since multiple traces capturing the same event 
won't be able to reconcile their copies with each other.

Daniel U. Thibault
Protection des systèmes et contremesures (PSC) | Systems Protection & 
Countermeasures (SPC)
Cyber sécurité pour les missions essentielles (CME) | Mission Critical Cyber 
Security (MCCS)
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