Interesting, I assume you're referring to some extension of eBPF that happened in the 4.9 pulls. AFAIK eBPF already is pretty functional in 4.8. What got added that allows full dynamic tracing? (And what is full dynamic tracing?).
> Timed sampling was the final major piece, and it landed in Linux 4.9-rc1 (patchset). Many thanks to Alexei Starovoitov (now working on BPF at Facebook), the lead developer behind these BPF enhancements.
This is indeed something possible with DTrace that was difficult (or not very efficient) to do with eBPF before. I assume one could've hooked into one of the kernel interrupt/... functions and used that as a ghetto timer, but the gymastics to convert that to real time might've been daunting.
EDIT: Parent is probably referring to something mentioned here: http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2016-10-27/dtrace-for-linux.... Apparently timed sampling got added, I quote Brendan:
> Timed sampling was the final major piece, and it landed in Linux 4.9-rc1 (patchset). Many thanks to Alexei Starovoitov (now working on BPF at Facebook), the lead developer behind these BPF enhancements.
This is indeed something possible with DTrace that was difficult (or not very efficient) to do with eBPF before. I assume one could've hooked into one of the kernel interrupt/... functions and used that as a ghetto timer, but the gymastics to convert that to real time might've been daunting.