TRACE-CMD-STOP(1)

💅 TRACE-CMD-STOP 💅

okay bestie so this is the trace-cmd-stop page from the libtracefs manual, and it's literally the "pause" button for your kernel tracer. let's get into it 🎀

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✨ NAME ✨

trace-cmd-stop — stop the Ftrace Linux kernel tracer from writing to the ring buffer. that's it, that's the whole job, and she does it flawlessly 💅

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🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

trace-cmd stop [OPTIONS]

that's the whole vibe. short, sweet, iconic.

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

okay so trace-cmd(1) stop is the complement to trace-cmd-start(1) — like, they're a matching set, yin and yang, the duo we didn't know we needed 🫶. what it does is disable Ftrace from writing to the ring buffer.

but — and this is the part everyone skips, so listen up 🔥 — this does not stop the overhead that the tracing may incur. only the updating of the ring buffer is disabled. the Ftrace tracing may still be inducing overhead. so like, she's not fully asleep, she's just not taking notes anymore. no cap.

after stopping the trace, trace-cmd-extract(1) may strip out the data from the ring buffer and create a trace.dat file. the Ftrace pseudo file system may also be examined. cute, right? 💖

⚠️ okay so if you want to disable the tracing completely and remove the overhead it causes, you gotta use trace-cmd-reset(1). but — and this is the dramatic part 😭 — after a reset is performed, the data that has been recorded is lost. gone. deleted. not coming back. so think before you reset, bestie. 💀

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🎀 OPTIONS 🎀

• -B buffer-name — if the kernel supports multiple buffers, this will stop the trace for only the given buffer. it does not affect any other buffer ✨. you can use this multiple times to specify different buffers. and heads up — when this option is used, the top level instance will not be stopped unless -t is given. iykyk 👑
• -a — stop the trace for all existing buffer instances 🌈. same deal though: when this option is used, the top level instance will not be stopped unless -t is given. the -t gatekeeping is real 🙈
• -t — stops the top level instance buffer 👑. without the -B or -a option this is the same as the default. but if -B or -a is used, this is required if the top level instance buffer should also be stopped. she's the main character of this option list, honestly.

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💜 SEE ALSO 💜

go read these next, bestie, they're all part of the same friend group:

trace-cmd(1), trace-cmd-record(1), trace-cmd-report(1), trace-cmd-start(1), trace-cmd-extract(1), trace-cmd-reset(1), trace-cmd-split(1), trace-cmd-list(1), trace-cmd-listen(1)

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⭐ AUTHOR ⭐

Written by Steven Rostedt, <rostedt@goodmis.org[1]> — legend behaviour, honestly 👑

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🧚 RESOURCES 🧚

https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/utils/trace-cmd/trace-cmd.git/

go poke around, the source is right there 🍓

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💖 COPYING 💖

Copyright (C) 2010 Red Hat, Inc. Free use of this software is granted under the terms of the GNU Public License (GPL). slay 💅

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🐚 NOTES 🐚

1. rostedt@goodmis.org mailto:rostedt@goodmis.org

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and that's the whole page bestie!! 🌟 this was libtracefs, dated 03/09/2026, page TRACE-CMD-STOP(1) — go forth and stop those traces responsibly, mwah 😘🦋