Yes, we can verify that the tracepoints are indeed nop
assembly operations in a Bitcoin Core binary with tracepoints.
The Bitcoin Core doc/tracing.md
contains a section on listing avaliabe tracepoints.
For example, readelf -n src/bitcoind
can be used to list ELF notes in the binary. There is an ELF note in the stapsdt
section for each tracepoint. This note contains the location of the tracepoint in the binary.