bpftrace vs pwru

bpftrace is a free, high-level tracing language and general-purpose Linux tracing tool built on eBPF. It supports kernel and user-space dynamic tracing, perf events, USDT, uprobes, and tracepoints. Its language draws from awk, C, DTrace, and SystemTap. Programs can come from files, inline -e input, or standard input, and the standard library supplies builtins, functions, macros, and map-value functions. LLVM compiles scripts to eBPF bytecode; libbpf interacts with Linux’s BPF subsystem, with bcc also used in the implementation. Scripts can import bpftrace files, C headers, BPF C source, and supported directory files. Unsafe helpers require --unsafe, and imports from world-writable directories are refused. The default probe maximum is 1,024; increasing it can raise memory use, startup time, overhead, or risk freezes and crashes. Supported architectures include x86_64, arm64, s390x, arm32, loongarch64, mips64, ppc64, and riscv64. Some features need kernel headers; vmlinux BTF needs Linux 4.18 or later with CONFIG_DEBUG_INFO_BTF enabled.

pwru has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.