There's at least 9 different tracers for Linux, but only 3 built-in. - perf_events (the "perf" command), which is intended as the official end-user profiler/tr

There's at least 9 different tracers for Linux, but only 3 built-in. - perf_events (the "perf" command), which is intended as the official end-user profiler/tracer. It's great at PMCs and sampling. It can do dynamic tracing and tracepoints. - ftrace (currently being renamed to "trace", to bring its ambiguity on-par with doing an internet search for "perf"), which is really a collection of custom lightweight tracing capabilities, developed to aid the real time kernel work. - eBPF, which is an engine that both perf_events and trace could make use of. I talked about the more here: http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2015-07-08/choosing-a-linux-tracer.html http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2015-07-08/choosing-a-linux... So you could say that the plan is there is one: perf_events. There's already work to bring eBPF to perf. perf already has a Python scripting interface, so it's not inconceivable that one day bcc will become part of perf. Some (f)trace capabilities could be rewritten/improved in eBPF, which could mean some cleanup. But the ftrace implementation wasn't bulky to start with.