Perf can be used as an alternative to strace but with much less overhead with the following syntax:

# perf trace record <command>  

However, the Yocto recipe for perf does not currently build this support. We can see the missing library in the compilation log:

Makefile:681: No libaudit.h found, disables 'trace' tool, please 
install audit-libs-devel or libaudit-dev  

In order to build perf with trace support we need to add the audit package to the DEPENDS package list in its recipe, which is available, for example, in the meta-selinux layer.