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Re: Systemtap userspace probing: status and roadmap?


Hi Stefano,

On Wed, 2008-11-05 at 12:33 +0100, Stefano Doni wrote:
> Now the whole situation is more clear to me. I didn't know that
> utrace/uprobe wasn't part of mainline kernel, I really look forward
> for this to happen.

Parts of utrace are now trickling into the upstream kernel.

> Is there any linux distro easy to try with that patches included?
> Fedora 10? This way systemtap testing would be much easier in a VM,
> for example.

Systemtap contains the relevant uprobes sources now. CentOS 5 comes with
a utrace included in the kernel that is compatible with the uprobes
version 1, which is pretty stable (but based on an older 2.6.18 kernel).

Fedora 10 will come (current prereleases/rawhide already have) a utrace
compatible with the uprobes version 2 that Jim just landed in systemtap
git (the code picks up the right version depending on the utrace version
in the kernel it is running on). I just tested that against the rawhide
kernel 2.6.27.4-68.fc10.i686 and it seems to work for some quick and
dirty test cases. Hurray for Jim!

Note, that Fedora 9 kernels (2.6.26 based) contain an alternative utrace
version that doesn't seem very stable combined with the new uprobes
version 2 (and doesn't work at all against uprobes version 1). So you
really want either a CentOS or Fedora 10/rawhide kernel for now to play
with the user space probes.

Cheers,

Mark


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