Hello I talked about systemTap for about 15 minutes at tonight's meeting. I figured it was worth while to give people some links:
Home page: http://sourceware.org/systemtap/ Wiki: http://sourceware.org/systemtap/wiki I installed it on my Ubuntu 8.04 beta system, it required that I install a few packages that are not listed as a prereq for systemTap. The webpage: http://sourceware.org/systemtap/wiki/SystemtapOnUbuntu describes what is needed. It seems to be an interesting, if somewhat complex tool that can really let you see what's happening on your system. From the Intoduction on the systemTap tutorial: Systemtap is a tool that allows developers and administrators to write and reuse simple scripts to deeply examine the activities of a live Linux system. Data may be extracted, filtered, and summarized quickly and safely, to enable diagnoses of complex performance or functional problems. The essential idea behind a systemtap script is to name events, and to give them handlers. Whenever a specified event occurs, the Linux kernel runs the handler as if it were a quick subroutine, then resumes. There are several kind of events, such as entering or exiting a function, a timer expiring, or the entire systemtap session starting or stopping. A handler is a series of script language statements that specify the work to be done whenever the event occurs. This work normally includes extracting data from the event context, storing them into internal variables, or printing results. Systemtap works by translating the script to C, running the system C compiler to create a kernel module from that. When the module is loaded, it activates all the probed events by hooking into the kernel. Then, as events occur on any processor, the compiled handlers run. Eventually, the session stops, the hooks are disconnected, and the module removed. This entire process is driven from a single command-line program, stap. Jim
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