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Systemtap userspace probing: status and roadmap?


Hi guys,
    first of all let me thank you for the efforts you give on this
wonderful tool! I'm a great fan of this project and of this kind of
tools in general, since I have a passion for performance analysis,
testing and tuning. I often read that the you are willing to hear some
feedback about what user wants, so I thought it would be nice to ask
you some question and share some whishes that a user can have about
such a good tool.

I would like to know what is the current status of Systemtap user
space probing and what is the future roadmap (if such a thing exists).
For example, man stapprobes in my Ubuntu Intrepid tells me that only
"early prototype support" for user space probing is available.

IMHO a great part of value of this kind of tools is to be able to
observe the whole system, in particular the user space layer, which is
often the culprit of real life performance issues. This meas to be
able to measure how things go into the application, for example doing
all the kind of measurements that a profiler can perform, such as:

- inclusive and exclusive method latencies
- object allocation
- lock contention
- "hot" application areas (CPU and IO resources)

Having *one* tool such as Systemtap and being able to perform *all*
the performance analysis on a *live* system without acquiring external
(and intrusive) profilers to me is the *greatest* value of a tool like
that.

I read that DTrace already do this for a bunch of programming
languages (most importantly Java but also Ruby, Python and even
Javascript). Having Systemtap being able to do this kind of
measurements (for example with Java, usually the language found in
enterprise installations) would be definitely my best dream!

Thanks again and keep up with the hard work!


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