Deprecating lttng tracepoints. (and add alternative for linux if wanted) #18971
Description
I am proposing that we deprecate lttng tracepoints in favour of vanilla linux tracepoint support. I've started working on a POC for this personally.
I added lttng support way back in the day: #702
However, a PR has been opened recently that reveals building with lttng support has broken for over 2 years: #18945
And this is the commit that broke it: f1d2792 (June 28, 2016)
Very few people seem to use it or need it based on the above pr. The benefit of lttng is that when node is built with support for it, you can activate tracing your program from lttng without much overhead affecting it. It has been designed to be low enough overhead that you can run it in production to get useful information from the environment, if needed.
However, to build and use node with lttng support enabled, you need to be on linux with lttng installed on your system. There is not much value added to the general linux userbase because there is barrier of entry to using this that requires specific lttng knowledge.
If we added support for vanilla linux tracepoints, as @AndreasMadsen suggests here, lttng users can still consume these. By adding vanilla linux tracepoints, other alternative tracing tools should be able to use these new tracepoints too. Additionally we could consider beginning to compile node with support for these tracepoints enabled by default on linux.
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