Research topic
This topic groups research on Linux kernel tracing and kernel-event analysis for understanding execution behavior, resource contention, performance anomalies, and system-level observability. The collection includes work on trace collection, event and state representations, diagnosis, noise reduction, and trace-driven explanations. Individual paper pages identify the actual tracer, event sources, kernel versions, workloads, and evaluation evidence when those details were reported.
Related search terms: kernel trace · Linux kernel trace analysis · kernel event tracing · system-level tracing
35 papers in this topic, ordered newest first. The detailed paper records contain the evidence-grounded methods, tools, datasets, findings, and citation guidance.
2026 · ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE)
B-Perf reconstructs execution, memory, and messaging behavior from Linux kernel-level traces and infers performance-antipattern indicators without requiring application source access or intrusive instrumentation.
Keywords: performance antipatterns · black-box detection · system-level execution traces · LTTng · Trace Compass
2026 · Journal of Systems and Software
DTraComp is an open-source Eclipse Trace Compass framework that compares groups of distributed requests and attributes span time to user-space, kernel, thread-state, and system-call evidence.
Keywords: DTraComp · distributed trace comparison · OpenTracing · LTTng · LTTng-UST
2026 · Journal of Systems and Software
LMAT combines multi-task language models for kernel-event and event-duration prediction with online change detection, lightweight error-vector root-cause analysis, and adaptive tracing control.
Keywords: adaptive tracing · LTTng · kernel events · system-call sequences · event-duration modeling
2026 · arXiv / CoRR; arXiv page reports acceptance to ICSE 2026
TAAF combines time-indexed knowledge graphs with large language models to turn large execution traces into queryable, actionable explanations.
Keywords: TAAF · TraceQA-100 · time-indexed knowledge graph · natural-language trace queries · multi-hop reasoning
2026 · ACM International Conference on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE) Companion
TraceSynth generates novel structured kernel-trace windows with a Transformer diffusion model and repairs generated events against invariants mined from real LTTng traces.
Keywords: kernel traces · trace generation · diffusion models · constraint-guided generation · LTTng
2025 · IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE)
The paper reconstructs missing system-call events in execution traces with diffusion and structured state-space generative models.
Keywords: execution trace reconstruction · trace imputation · diffusion models · DiffWave · SSSDS4
2024 · Journal of Systems and Software
The paper releases a reusable Linux kernel-event and system-call artifact with controlled application workloads, injected resource noise, and analysis scenarios for software performance engineering.
Keywords: LTTng · Linux kernel events · system calls · kernel tracepoints · Elasticsearch
2024 · 2024 IEEE International Conference on Collaborative Advances in Software and COmputiNg (CASCON)
The paper detects and localizes performance noise by aligning passive kernel-event evidence with the life cycle of CPU, disk, and network requests rather than treating resource utilization as an undifferentiated aggregate.
Keywords: kernel event monitoring · resource life cycle · noise detection · CPU requests · disk requests
2024 · 2024 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering: New Ideas and Emerging Results (ICSE-NIER)
The paper proposes an adaptive tracing loop that combines language-model prediction of kernel-event sequences and event durations with change detection and root-cause analysis, so detailed tracing is activated only around significant behavior shifts.
Keywords: adaptive tracing · LTTng · kernel events · system-call sequences · event-duration modeling
2023 · 2023 IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering and Research (SERA)
The paper presents a multi-level adaptive tracing workflow that uses lightweight stress detection and performance evidence to change the application/kernel instrumentation scope during an investigation.
Keywords: adaptive execution tracing · time-series trends · multi-level tracing · kernel tracing · performance analysis
2023 · IEEE Working Conference on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation (SCAM)
PASD uses Linux kernel-event traces, Perf call stacks, and statistical debugging to rank functions associated with performance problems without application-source instrumentation.
Keywords: statistical debugging · Linux kernel tracepoints · Perf · perf record · call stacks
2022 · Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience
The paper combines model-based quantitative constraints with user-space and kernel execution traces to automatically identify likely causes of real-time and multicore constraint violations.
Keywords: model-based constraints · execution tracing · user-space traces · kernel traces · LTTng
2022 · IEEE Working Conference on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation (SCAM)
N-Lane Bridge extends One-Lane Bridge analysis to active-resource bottlenecks and uses LTTng system-level traces to distinguish application-caused congestion from external interference.
Keywords: N-Lane Bridge · One-Lane Bridge · performance antipatterns · system-level execution tracing · LTTng
2022 · 2022 IEEE International Conference on Cloud Engineering (IC2E)
This poster proposes operating-system-aware antipattern detection that uses system-level traces and scalability trends to expose resource blocking that aggregate CPU utilization can hide.
Keywords: operating-system support · application performance analysis · performance instrumentation · IC2E 2022 · poster paper
2021 · Electronics
The paper combines Jaeger distributed traces with LTTng kernel and user-space events and extends critical-path analysis from threads to distributed requests so request latency can be related to low-level scheduling and resource behavior.
Keywords: distributed tracing · kernel tracing · cloud applications · cross-layer performance analysis · LTTng
2021 · IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing Technology and Science (CloudCom)
The paper characterizes container workloads from host-level LTTng traces by selecting important threads and clustering execution-state behavior without instrumenting the containers internally.
Keywords: container workloads · host tracing · LTTng · pid_ns · tid
2021 · 2021 IEEE International Systems Conference (SysCon)
The paper combines LTTng system-call monitoring with recurrent and Transformer-style models for malware and anomalous system-behavior detection.
Keywords: malware detection · system-call analysis · LTTng · Trace Compass · LSTM
2020 · IEEE 20th International Working Conference on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation (SCAM)
DepGraph uses system-level tracing to expose the waiting dependencies that divide a task's execution time across threads and hardware resources.
Keywords: waiting dependency graph · system-level tracing · blocking dependencies · performance bottlenecks · thread-resource interactions
2020 · Softwaretechnik-Trends
The paper adapts community detection and PageRank from social-network analysis to reduce and prioritize system execution traces.
Keywords: LTTng · Trace Compass · Louvain community detection · PageRank · thread interaction graph
2020 · IEEE International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering Workshops (ISSREW)
The paper extends critical-path analysis across kernel and user-space lock events so contention from futexes, spinlocks, semaphores, and other synchronization mechanisms can be diagnosed without recompiling the application.
Keywords: lock contention · multi-level execution traces · LTTng 2.10 · Trace Compass 4 · LD_PRELOAD
2020 · Journal of Cloud Computing
The paper combines host-level user/kernel tracing with machine learning to detect intrusion behavior on constrained IoT and home-automation systems.
Keywords: IoT intrusion detection · host-based IDS · LTTng · barectf · Common Trace Format
2019 · IEEE International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering Workshops (ISSREW)
The paper presents a tracing and analysis pipeline that detects slow web requests and groups them by internal execution behavior to expose likely causes.
Keywords: web requests · user-space tracing · kernel-space tracing · outlier detection · behavior clustering
2019 · Journal of Hardware and Systems Security
The paper combines execution-trace and virtual-machine metrics with machine learning to detect EDoS behavior and restrict resource expansion to apparently normal VMs.
Keywords: Economic Denial of Sustainability · EDoS · DDoS · cloud computing · execution trace analysis
2018 · IEEE International Conference on Consumer Electronics (ICCE)
The paper correlates OpenStack Nova, QEMU/KVM, and host/guest kernel evidence to diagnose live-migration behavior across cloud-system layers.
Keywords: cloud tracing · high-level tracing · low-level tracing · cross-layer observability · OpenStack Nova
2017 · IEEE High Performance Extreme Computing Conference (HPEC)
The paper introduces a kernel-resident dynamic sampler that tracks virtual and physical memory usage while reducing the event volume generated by high-frequency memory activity.
Keywords: memory usage · dynamic sampling · enterprise applications · trace overhead · LTTng
2017 · Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience
The paper designs and evaluates hardware-assisted alternatives to LTTng-UST for software-event and execution-path tracing, including STM/ETB, ETM/ETB, and a modified Perf/BTS path.
Keywords: hardware-assisted tracing · software events · event collection · trace overhead · ARM CoreSight
2017 · Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience
The survey provides a taxonomy and requirements-oriented comparison of techniques for collecting, abstracting, analyzing, visualizing, and navigating large execution traces.
Keywords: trace navigation · multi-scale analysis · trace visualization · content abstraction · metric abstraction
2016 · IEEE BigData Congress
eSHT redesigns the State History Tree to store and query highly parallel trace intervals more compactly and with shallower trees.
Keywords: Enhanced State History Tree · eSHT · State History Tree · interval data · external-memory indexing
2016 · IEEE Future Internet of Things and Cloud Workshops (FiCloudW)
The paper fuses synchronized host and virtual-machine kernel traces into a Fused Virtual Machine view that exposes how VM threads, virtual CPUs, hypervisor transitions, and physical CPUs interact.
Keywords: virtualized systems · kernel tracing · multilayer analysis · virtualization overhead · LTTng
2015 · IEEE BigData Congress
The paper provides a declarative XML/state-machine approach for flexible filtering and synthetic-event generation over large kernel traces.
Keywords: execution trace filtering · LTTng 2.4.0 · Trace Compass · finite-state machine · declarative analysis
2015 · Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience
The paper proposes a multilevel data-cube model for computing statistics over live execution traces across several time scales.
Keywords: data cube · stream cube · live trace statistics · LTTng · State History Tree
2013 · ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review
The framework computes system-parameter statistics for arbitrary intervals and resource hierarchies from very large traces using a disk-resident history structure and controlled granularity.
Keywords: trace statistics · LTTng · Linux kernel 2.6.38.6 · disk-resident interval tree · history tree
2013 · IEEE International Conference on Social Computing
The paper presents a disk-oriented State History Tree that stores very large, time-ordered trace intervals without repeated node rebalancing.
Keywords: State History Tree · disk-based interval data · streaming interval data · time-ordered intervals · LTTng
2012 · Advances in Software Engineering
The paper introduces a stateful trace-abstraction method that converts low-level kernel events into semantic and synthetic events using modeled resource state and finite-state patterns.
Keywords: stateful trace abstraction · synthetic events · semantic events · modeled state · finite-state machine
2012 · 16th IASTED International Conference on Software Engineering and Applications (SEA 2012)
The paper introduces a stateful trace-abstraction architecture that shares modeled system state and intermediate computation across concurrent patterns to reduce the cost of analyzing large Linux kernel traces.
Keywords: multi-core tracing · LTTng · Linux kernel 2.6.38.6 · stateful trace analysis · trace abstraction