Abstract: A kernel trace system is described that acts as a kernel driver to insert traces into an open system kernel using existing kernel probe application-programming interfaces (APIs) and copies these events to an existing logging module for transfer to user space. The new module aggregates kernel traces to a performance logging module. A performance logging module can be extended with the kernel trace system herein to include new events in an open kernel not originally included in the implementation of the performance logging module. In this way, the kernel trace system can cause events to be logged that were not logged in the kernel as provided by the operating system vendor, and can do so without requiring that a new version of the operating system be built. The probes can be inserted dynamically at run time on an existing kernel to extract additional trace information.