Many of these tools employ workarounds so that functionality is possible on existing Linux kernels. This collection was created by Brendan Gregg (author of the DTraceToolkit). These tools are designed to be easy to install (fewest dependencies), provide advanced performance observability, and be simple to use: do one thing and do it well. Your system probably has ftrace already, and perf is often just a package add (see Prerequisites). Both ftrace and perf are core Linux tracing tools, included in the kernel source. A miscellaneous collection of in-development and unsupported performance analysis tools for Linux ftrace and perf_events (aka the 'perf' command).
