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Request for Feedback: Dynamic Logging's future (Should we deprecate Dynamic Logging?) #666
Description
Summary
https://docs.pixielabs.ai/tutorials/custom-data/dynamic-go-logging/
Pixie Dynamic Logging let users write eBPF uprobes in PXL script, Pixie then deploys the uprobes onto user-specified Pods, and collect the data into Pixie's own data store.
https://docs.pixielabs.ai/tutorials/custom-data/distributed-bpftrace-deployment
Pixie also has Distributed Bpftrace Deployment, which lets users deploy kprobes and uprobes on Kubernetes cluster.
Given the limited capability of the PXL language, Dynamic Logging is used much less than Distributed Bpftrace Deployment. We are looking for feedbacks from the community regarding the future directions of Dynamic Logging.
Suggestions
- One option is to simply remove Dynamic Logging from Pixie. That greatly reduces our maintenance burden.
- Another option is to further expand PXL language support for Dynamic Logging to make it more powerful and useful.
- A hybrid option is to extra the useful part of Dynamic Logging and contributed to BPFtrace, for example, the part of navigating struct variables with DWARF information (already part of BPFTrace https://github.com/iovisor/bpftrace/blob/master/docs/reference_guide.md#4-uprobeuretprobe-dynamic-tracing-user-level-arguments) could get improved with Pixie's current implementation.
- Any other suggestions?
Reacted by yzhao and Mayank Singh Chauhan
Activity
[-]Looking for inputs on Pixie's (Golang only) Dynamic Logging's future direction[/-][+]Request for Feedback: Dynamic Logging's future (Should we deprecate Dynamic Logging?)[/+]oazizi000 commentedon Mar 16, 2023
Given the lack of feedback, we are now proposing to deprecate the Dynamic Logging feature.
Rationale:
If anyone believes that Dynamic Logging should be maintained, we would need to identify someone to further develop and maintain it. If there is not enough support for keeping Dynamic Logging over the next 30 days, we intend to start the deprecation process.
mayanksingh2298 commentedon Apr 25, 2023
I think it's an interesting feature to be able to probe production deployments in user space. I see possible use-cases around live debugging of variables. As far as I remember Delve recently introduced ebpf backend. So I find it a little hard to believe that there's not enough need for it.
I think expanding PXL language support makes much more sense. (Maybe using the distributed bpftrace deployment).
Anyways, I'll be happy to contribute to this. Is there some more documentation around using pxtrace - something more than https://docs.px.dev/reference/pxl/tracepoint-decorator/pxtrace.probe/
mayanksingh2298 commentedon Apr 25, 2023
Also can you help answer, can distributed bpftrace using PXL do everything that dynamic logging does? (around working with uprobes and uretprobes)
Fix `ExtractGolangInterface` to handle go 1.20 binaries and later (#2093
ddelnano commentedon Jun 9, 2025
Since #2108 was merged, the decision was to keep the feature around for now.
Fix `ExtractGolangInterface` to handle go 1.20 binaries and later (pi…
Fix `ExtractGolangInterface` to handle go 1.20 binaries and later (pi…
Fix `ExtractGolangInterface` to handle go 1.20 binaries and later (pi…
Fix `ExtractGolangInterface` to handle go 1.20 binaries and later (pi…