By default, the principal buffer has a switch buffer policy. Under this policy, per-CPU buffers are allocated in pairs, where one buffer is active and the other buffer is inactive. When a DTrace consumer attempts to read a buffer, the kernel first switches the inactive and active buffers. Buffer switching is done in such a manner that there is no window in which tracing data can be lost. When the buffers are switched, the newly inactive buffer is copied out to the DTrace consumer. This policy assures that the consumer always sees a self-consistent buffer. Note that a buffer is never simultaneously traced to and copied out. This technique also avoids introducing a window of time in which tracing is paused or otherwise prevented. The rate at which the buffer is switched and read out is controlled by the consumer with the switchrate option. As with any rate option, switchrate can be specified with the any time suffix, but defaults to rate-per-second. For more information about switchrate and other options, see Options and Tunables.

Under the switch policy, if a given enabled probe would trace more data than there is space available in the active principal buffer, the data is dropped and a per-CPU drop count is incremented. In the event of one or more drops, dtrace displays a message similar to the following:

dtrace: 11 drops on CPU 0

If a given record is larger than the total buffer size, the record is dropped, regardless of buffer policy. You can reduce or eliminate drops, either by increasing the size of the principal buffer with the bufsize option, or by increasing the switching rate with the switchrate option.

Under the switch policy, scratch memory for DTrace subroutines is allocated out of the active buffer.

For some problems, you might want to use a single, in-kernel buffer. While this approach can be implemented with the switch policy and appropriate D constructs by incrementing a variable in D and predicating an exit action appropriately, such an implementation does not eliminate the possibility of drops. To request a single, large in-kernel buffer and continue tracing until one or more of the per-CPU buffers has filled, use the fill buffer policy. Under this policy, tracing continues until an enabled probe attempts to trace more data than can fit in the remaining principal buffer space. When insufficient space remains, the buffer is marked as filled and the consumer is notified that at least one of its per-CPU buffers is filled. When dtrace detects a single filled buffer, tracing is stopped, all buffers are processed, and dtrace exits. No further data is traced to a filled buffer even if the data would fit in the buffer.

To use the fill policy, set the bufpolicy option to fill. For example, the following command traces every system call entry into a per-CPU 2 KB buffer with the buffer policy set to fill:

# dtrace -n syscall:::entry -b 2k -x bufpolicy=fill

END probes usually do not fire until tracing has been explicitly stopped by the DTrace consumer. END probes are guaranteed to fire only on one CPU, but the CPU on which the probe fires is undefined. With fill buffers, tracing is explicitly stopped when at least one of the per-CPU principal buffers has been marked as filled. If the fill policy is selected, the END probe might fire on a CPU that has a filled buffer. To accommodate END tracing in fill buffers, DTrace calculates the amount of space that is potentially consumed by END probes and subtracts this space from the size of the principal buffer. If the net size is negative, DTrace does not start and dtrace outputs the following error message:

dtrace: END enablings exceed size of principal buffer

The reservation mechanism ensures that a full buffer always has sufficient space for any END probes.

The DTrace ring buffer policy assists with tracing the events leading up to a failure. If reproducing the failure takes hours or days, you might want to keep only the most recent data. When a principal buffer has filled, tracing wraps around to the first entry, overwriting older tracing data. You establish the ring buffer by specifying bufpolicy=ring as follows:

# dtrace -s foo.d -x bufpolicy=ring

When used to create a ring buffer, dtrace does not display any output until the process is terminated. At that time, the ring buffer is consumed and processed. The dtrace command processes each ring buffer in CPU order. Within a CPU's buffer, trace records are displayed in order from oldest to youngest. Just as with the switch buffering policy, no ordering exists between records from different CPUs. If such an ordering is required, you should trace the timestamp variable as part of your tracing request.

The following example demonstrates the use of a #pragma option directive to enable ring buffering:

#pragma D option bufpolicy=ring
#pragma D option bufsize=16k

syscall:::entry
/execname == $1/
{
  trace(timestamp);
}

syscall::exit:entry
{
  exit(0);
}