Re: Discussion at Linux Foundation Japan Symposium

["jidong xiao" <jidong.xiao@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Dec 18, 2008 at 4:57 PM, Jun Koi <junkoi2004@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 18, 2008 at 5:09 PM, Satoshi OSHIMA
> <satoshi.oshima.fk@hitachi.com> wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> Long time no see and sorry for my late report.
>>
>> I attended 9th Linux Foundation Japan Symposium and
>> discussed on issues of systemtap project with Ted Ts'o,
>> James Bottomley and Jonathan Corbet.
>>
>> In my understanding, they demand the following things:
>>
>> (1) Follow upstream first
>>
>> Utrace and uprobe features are currently available only
>> on Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, since those
>> patches are not merged into upstream kernel yet.
>>
>> my suggestion:
>>
>> To reduce complaints of upstream kernel developers,
>> systemtap project may need to postpone adding new
>> uprobe features until getting utrace (and uprobe)
>> patch set accepted in mainline.
>>
>>
>> (2) Maintain tapset
>>
>> Systemtap users (including kernel developers) get
>> frustrated because tapsets often do not work on
>> the latest kernel. Moreover, sometimes users
>> have to fix the tapset incompatibility of kernels.
>>
>> my suggestion:
>>
>> If systemtap procjet can fix this kind of incompatibilities
>> within a few hours or days as Myths about systemtap
>> on the wiki claims, releasing new systemtap minor release
>> tarball for each upstream kernel release would help users.
>>
>>
>> (3) Make no debuginfo version
>>
>> Systemtap always requires kernel debuginfo to use.
>> Unfortunately, it is hard for users of some distributions
>> to have debuginfo.
>>
>
> How is it possible to do that without kernel debug info? Currently
> systemtap extracts lots of information on kernel layout from debug
> info, so I dont understand why we can survive without that.
>
> Thanks,
> Jun
>
But not every distribution contains kernel debuginfo packages,
therefore this makes many people not easy to use systemtap.

Regards
Jason