Instrumenting XEN and KVM using Systemtap

Instrumenting XEN and KVM using Systemtap

[satya komaragiri]

Hello,

I and my mentor, Mr. Eugene Teo (cc-ed in this mail) have been
discussing some interesting project ideas involving systemtap. I have
worked with Systemtap in this year's Google Summer of Code on the
bootlimn project[1] for Fedora.

Interested in working further with systemtap, he gave me this suggestion
about instrumenting XEN and KVM. We felt that getting information
about the guest from the host might be an interesting project.

We wanted to know if this idea would be feasible and useful for the
community. I would be grateful for any suggestions/feedback related to
this.

Regards
Satya

[1] http://code.google.com/soc/2008/fedora/appinfo.html?csaid=43B0BE196B874499

Re: Instrumenting XEN and KVM using Systemtap

[Masami Hiramatsu]

Hi satya,

I'm also interested in (early) boot-time systemtap tracing and
virtualization support.

As far as I know, the nearest project is the VESPER project, which
is the framework to gather the state of guest kernel. They will
support systemtap on their framework.

Vesper:
http://vesper.sourceforge.net/

And also, the Xenprobe which is a prototype of guest probing
infrastructure like kprobes, has been published. (I'm not sure
he opened his code.)

Xenprobe:
www.usenix.org/events/usenix07/tech/full_papers/quynh/quynh.pdf

Thank you,

satya komaragiri wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I and my mentor, Mr. Eugene Teo (cc-ed in this mail) have been
> discussing some interesting project ideas involving systemtap. I have
> worked with Systemtap in this year's Google Summer of Code on the
> bootlimn project[1] for Fedora.
> 
> Interested in working further with systemtap, he gave me this suggestion
> about instrumenting XEN and KVM. We felt that getting information
> about the guest from the host might be an interesting project.
> 
> We wanted to know if this idea would be feasible and useful for the
> community. I would be grateful for any suggestions/feedback related to
> this.
> 
> Regards
> Satya
> 
> [1] http://code.google.com/soc/2008/fedora/appinfo.html?csaid=43B0BE196B874499

-- 
Masami Hiramatsu

Software Engineer
Hitachi Computer Products (America) Inc.
Software Solutions Division

e-mail: mhiramat@redhat.com

Re: Instrumenting XEN and KVM using Systemtap

[Eugene Teo]

Hi Satya,

On Thu, Sep 11, 2008 at 10:57 PM, Masami Hiramatsu <mhiramat@redhat.com> wrote:
> As far as I know, the nearest project is the VESPER project, which
> is the framework to gather the state of guest kernel. They will
> support systemtap on their framework.

You can read about VESPER here:
http://ols.fedoraproject.org/OLS/Reprints-2008/kim1-reprint.pdf

Eugene

Re: Instrumenting XEN and KVM using Systemtap

[Eugene Teo]

Hi Satya,

On Thu, Sep 11, 2008 at 10:07 PM, satya komaragiri
<satya.komaragiri@gmail.com> wrote:
[...]
> Interested in working further with systemtap, he gave me this suggestion
> about instrumenting XEN and KVM. We felt that getting information
> about the guest from the host might be an interesting project.

By that, I mean writing useful tapsets that one can use to write
meaningful scripts to instrument or gather information from the
running guest.

Thanks, Eugene

Re: Instrumenting XEN and KVM using Systemtap

[Masami Hiramatsu]

Eugene Teo wrote:
> Hi Satya,
> 
> On Thu, Sep 11, 2008 at 10:07 PM, satya komaragiri
> <satya.komaragiri@gmail.com> wrote:
> [...]
>> Interested in working further with systemtap, he gave me this suggestion
>> about instrumenting XEN and KVM. We felt that getting information
>> about the guest from the host might be an interesting project.
> 
> By that, I mean writing useful tapsets that one can use to write
> meaningful scripts to instrument or gather information from the
> running guest.

I think VESPER project members might be interested in those
scripts, even if they are focusing on high-availability.

Thank you,

> 
> Thanks, Eugene

-- 
Masami Hiramatsu

Software Engineer
Hitachi Computer Products (America) Inc.
Software Solutions Division

e-mail: mhiramat@redhat.com

Re: Instrumenting XEN and KVM using Systemtap

[satya komaragiri]

Hello

Thank you so much for the links and your feedback sir.

Regards
Satya

Re: Instrumenting XEN and KVM using Systemtap

[satya komaragiri]

Hello

I was reading the paper here:
http://ols.fedoraproject.org/OLS/Reprints-2008/kim1-reprint.pdf

Was wondering what " We have a plan to integrate the feature of VESPERs for
virtualization into the SystemTap for its versatile usage in the
native kernel as well as the virtualized kernel." means.
(section: 7.2)

I thought they'd use systemtap scripts in VESPER. Or is it the other way round?

Regards
Satya