QEMU-TRACE-STAP(1)

✨ NAME ✨

qemu-trace-stap — QEMU SystemTap trace tool. This is the qemu-trace-stap(1) manual page, bestie, and it’s literally about tracing QEMU emulators with SystemTap 💖

🦋 SYNOPSIS 🦋

qemu-trace-stap [GLOBAL-OPTIONS] COMMAND [COMMAND-OPTIONS] ARGS...

🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

okay so qemu-trace-stap is the tool that facilitates tracing of the execution of QEMU emulators using SystemTap. It’s giving “tiny wrapper, big tracing energy” ✨

You need to have the SystemTap runtime environment installed to use this program, no cap, because it is a wrapper around execution of the stap program.

💅 OPTIONS 💅

The following global options may be used regardless of which command is executed:

• --verbose, -v — display verbose information about command execution 👀

The following commands are valid:

🎀 list BINARY PATTERN... 🎀

List all the probe names provided by BINARY that match PATTERN 💫

If BINARY is not an absolute path, it will be located by searching the directories listed in the $PATH environment variable.

PATTERN is a plain string that is used to filter the results of this command. It may optionally contain a * wildcard to facilitate matching multiple probes without listing each one explicitly. Multiple PATTERN arguments may be given, causing listing of probes that match any of the listed names. If no PATTERN is given, the all possible probes will be listed. Slay, but make sure you know what you’re asking for 🫶

For example, to list all probes available in the qemu-kvm binary:

$ qemu-trace-stap list qemu-kvm

To filter the list to only cover probes related to QEMU's cryptographic subsystem, in a binary outside $PATH:

$ qemu-trace-stap list /opt/qemu/11.1.0/bin/qemu-kvm 'qcrypto*'

🌈 run OPTIONS BINARY PATTERN... 🌈

Run a trace session, printing formatted output any time a process that is executing BINARY triggers a probe matching PATTERN 🔥

If BINARY is not an absolute path, it will be located by searching the directories listed in the $PATH environment variable.

PATTERN is a plain string that matches a probe name shown by the LIST command. It may optionally contain a * wildcard to facilitate matching multiple probes without listing each one explicitly. Multiple PATTERN arguments may be given, causing all matching probes to be monitored. At least one PATTERN is required, since stap is not capable of tracing all known QEMU probes concurrently without overflowing its trace buffer. That part is important, bestie — do not skip your PATTERN 😭

Invocation of this command does not need to be synchronized with invocation of the QEMU process(es). It will match probes on all existing running processes and all future launched processes, unless told to only monitor a specific process. Main character energy: it sees current QEMU besties and future ones 👑

Valid command specific options are:

• --pid=PID, -p PID — restrict the tracing session so that it only triggers for the process identified by PID 🎯

For example, to monitor all processes executing qemu-kvm as found on $PATH, displaying all I/O related probes:

$ qemu-trace-stap run qemu-kvm 'qio*'

To monitor only the QEMU process with PID 1732:

$ qemu-trace-stap run --pid=1732 qemu-kvm 'qio*'

To monitor QEMU processes running an alternative binary outside of $PATH, displaying verbose information about setup of the tracing environment:

$ qemu-trace-stap -v run /opt/qemu/11.1.0/bin/qemu-kvm 'qio*'

🫶 SEE ALSO 🫶

qemu(1), stap(1) — go give them a little look too, iykyk 💜

👑 COPYRIGHT 👑

2026, The QEMU Project Developers

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okay bestie that’s the whole page 💖 this one comes from QEMU 11.1.0, dated Oct 26, 2026, and it’s the QEMU-TRACE-STAP(1) manual page — periodt ✨