Josef Bacik, of Btrfs notoriety before leaving Meta and stepping back from kernel development last year, announced the release of Systing 1.0. Systing is a newer eBPF-tracing tool for Linux complete with AI integration.
Systing began as a tool to generate Perfetto traces of the system while now with Systing 1.0 has developed a “new AI identity.” Rather than manually creating scripts to analyze traces, Josef is now leveraging AI with the likes of Claude Code for making this tool more powerful. He’s also adapted Systring to using DuckDB databases rather than Perfetto traces to make it easier to query the data.
Systring 1.0 is able to feed the DuckDB-based traces into Claude Code for analysis and anaswering questions in real time about the data.
Systing has been used to improve the performance of a networking application as a case study as well as debugging a performance regression.
Josef Bacik concluded in his Systing 1.0 announcement:
“Using Claude Code to analyze systing traces has been a game changer for my debugging workflow. Systing was always a “playground” tool for me to explore different methods of visualizing and analyzing system behavior, and this latest evolution has been the closest thing to what I’ve always had in my head of the perfect tool. I’m excited to continue walking down this path and discover new ways I can improve the tooling to make my job easier.”
Last year at the systemd-aligned All Systems Go conference, Bacik also talked about Systing.
That presentation can be found on YouTube. The Rust-based Systing code is available via GitHub for this libbpf based tracer.
