TL;DR: Using eBPF in recent (>=4.4) Linux kernel, you can turn any kernel function call into a user land event with arbitrary data. This is made easy by bcc. The probe is written in C while the data is handled by python. If you are not familiar with eBPF or linux tracing, you really should read the full post. It tries to progressively go through the pitfalls I stumbled unpon while playing around with bcc / eBPF while saving you a lot of the time I spent searching and digging.