draft release notes

draft release notes

[Josh Stone]

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Hi all,

I've drafted notes for a new systemtap release.  Please review and let
me know if you have suggestions for improvement or if you see any omissions.

This is also your last chance to mention any release blocking bugs, so
speak up if you see any issues.  If nothing comes up, I hope to publish
the release at the end of the day tomorrow.

Thanks,

Josh

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The SystemTap team proudly announces release 0.9.8.

  Module signing, debuginfo package suggestions, system call
  dwarfless probing, new tapset functions, many bug fixes,
  and miscellaneous speed improvements.

= Where to get it

  http://sourceware.org/systemtap/ - our project page
  http://sourceware.org/systemtap/ftp/releases/systemtap-0.9.8.tar.gz
  http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/packageinfo?packageID=615
  git tag release-0.9.8 (commit FIXME)

= How to build it

  See the README and NEWS files at
  http://sourceware.org/git/?p=systemtap.git;a=tree
  Further information at http://sourceware.org/systemtap/wiki/

= SystemTap frontend (stap) changes

- Module signing: If the appropriate nss libraries are available on your
  system, stap will sign each compiled module using a self-generated
  certificate.  This is the first step toward extending authority to
  load certain modules to unprivileged users. For now, if the system
  administrator adds a certificate to a database of trusted signers
  (stap-authorize-signing-cert), modules signed using that certificate
  will be verified by staprun against tampering.  Otherwise, you should
  notice no difference in the operation of stap or staprun.

- Debuginfo suggestions: If a script fails in some way due to missing
  debugging information, stap will try to query rpm for which package
  supplied that binary and suggest the matching debuginfo packages to
  install.

= SystemTap script language changes

- Using %M in print formats for hex dumps can now print entire buffers,
  instead of just small numbers.

= SystemTap tapset changes

- Dwarfless syscalls: The nd_syscalls tapset is now available to probe
  system calls without requiring kernel debugging information.  All of
  the same probepoints in the normal syscalls tapset are available with
  an "nd_" prefix, e.g. syscall.open becomes nd_syscall.open.  Most
  syscall arguments are also available by name in nd_syscalls.

- Miscellaneous new functions:
  - sid() returns the session ID of the current process
  - stringat() indexes a single character from a string.

= New script examples

- io/ttyspy.stp           Monitor tty typing
- process/schedtimes.stp  Track time processes spend in various states

= Code contributors for this release

  Ananth N Mavinakayanahalli, Dave Brolley, David Smith, Don Domingo,
  Elliott Baron, Eugeniy Meshcheryakov, Frank Ch. Eigler, Jim Keniston,
  JoeLynn Keniston, Josh Stone, Kai Meyer, Keiichi KII, Kent Sebastian,
  Malte Nuhn, Mark Wielaard, Masami Hiramatsu, Petr Muller, Przemyslaw
  Pawelczyk, Stan Cox, Sunzen Wang, Wenji Huang, William Cohen

= Examples of tested kernel versions

  2.6.9 (el4/i386)
  2.6.18 (el5/ia64/i686/x86_64-xen)
  2.6.27.21 (f10/i686/x86_64)
  2.6.29.4 (f11/i586/x86_64)
  2.6.30 (i686/x86_64)

= Known issues with this release

  Some kernel crashes continue to be reported when a script probes broad
  kernel function wildcards.

  Some 2.6.28- and 2.6.29-era kernels contain bugs that can more easily
  trigger crashes upon systemtap scripts.  Upgrade to the latest -stable
  or -rc if possible.

= Problems resolved for this release

   3347 undesirable embedded-C functions at top level
   5630 support for single-stepping in user-space
   5635 unwind-data-based backtracing for userspace
   6930 Flight Recorder on file
   6933 Individual kprobes enable/disable support
   9997 provide run-time advice on how to install needed debuginfo
  10007 Some SystemTap tests need updates to handle SYSCALL_WRAPPERS
  10082 add environment variable to pass -r RELEASE/PATH option
  10091 Backward compatibility for insn probe point (itrace) on o...
  10102 optional probe points should silently accept "probe point...
  10117 on ppc64, tapset/context.stp is broken on older kernels
  10130 Argument to mktemp should have at least 6 X's
  10139 .probes section disappears into debuginfo
  10172 sdt.h on powerpc Error: junk at end of line: `0'
  10177 _stp_kill_time on RT-kernel hits BUG
  10182 systemtap.spec should clean up old leftover runtime/uprobes/
  10185 stap uprobe script on rawhide causes system crash
  10190 Suppress registration warnings for optional probes
  10206 symname() resolves incorrect symbols on ppc
  10209 extend configury for --disable-translator
  10232 backtrace through kretprobes via fallback unwinder 
  10260 Crash due to stale timer callbacks

= Test results on various systems

  After running "sudo make installcheck" from the test suite, on a
  suitably equipped machine (kernel debugging data and other stuff
  installed), you should see 800-850 passes and a small handful of
  failures.

Re: draft release notes

[Josh Stone]

On 12/21/2009 11:12 AM, David Smith wrote:
> Here are some draft release notes for the next systemtap release. Please
> review them and let me know if you have suggestions for improvement or
> if you see anything I've left out.

I think someone mentioned on IRC, but this is missing Contributors and
Tested Kernels.

> = SystemTap tapset changes
> 
> - ftrace(msg:string) tapset function to send strings to the system-wide
>   ftrace ring-buffer (if any).

We had a lot of tapset additions -- briefly:

- Additional scsi probepoints
- Additional memory probepoints for kernel allocation and freeing.
- Additional ioblock and ioscheduler probepoints.
- Additional scheduler probepoints
- New IRQ and workqueue probepoints.
- New TTY probepoints.

- New task_time tapset to query time usage.
- New proc_mem tapset to query memory usage.

These could all probably use fuller descriptions, or maybe just point to
the documentation...

Josh

draft release notes

[David Smith]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 294 bytes --]

Here are some draft release notes for the next systemtap release. Please
review them and let me know if you have suggestions for improvement or
if you see anything I've left out.

Thanks.

-- 
David Smith
dsmith@redhat.com
Red Hat
http://www.redhat.com
256.217.0141 (direct)
256.837.0057 (fax)

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The SystemTap team announces release 1.XXX.

  better support for gcc 4.5 richer DWARF debuginfo, new preprocessor
  conditional for kernel 'CONFIG_*' testing, improved (experimental)
  unprivileged user support, better local-vs-global variable warnings,
  better return codes, bug fixes, and more...

= Where to get it

  http://sourceware.org/systemtap/ - our project page
  http://sourceware.org/systemtap/ftp/releases/systemtap-1.XXX.tar.gz
  http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/packageinfo?packageID=615
  git tag release-1.XXX (commit FIXME)

= How to build it

  See the README and NEWS files at
  http://sourceware.org/git/?p=systemtap.git;a=tree
  Further information at http://sourceware.org/systemtap/wiki/

= SystemTap frontend (stap) changes

- Systemtap now warns about global variables being referenced from other
  script files.  This aims to protect against unintended local-vs-global 
  namespace collisions such as:

     % cat some_tapset.stp
     probe baz.one = bar { foo = $foo; bar = $bar }
     % cat end_user_script.stp
     global foo # intended to be private variable
     probe timer.s(1) { foo ++ }
     probe baz.* { println(foo, pp()) }
     % stap end_user_script.stp
     WARNING: cross-file global variable reference to foo from some_tapset.stp

- Better support for richer DWARF debuginfo output from GCC 4.5
  (variable tracking assignments). Kernel modules are now always resolved
  against all their dependencies to find any info referring to missing
  symbols. DW_AT_const_value is now supported when no DW_AT_location
  is available.

- Any output line that starts with "ERROR", as in error("foo"), will
  promote a "Pass 5: run failed", and the return code is 1.

- The loading of signed modules by staprun is no longer allowed for
  ordinary, unprivileged users.  This means that only root, members of
  the group 'stapdev' and members of the group 'stapusr' can load
  systemtap modules using staprun, stap or stap-client.  The minimum
  privilege required to run arbitrary --unprivileged scripts is now
  'stapusr' membership.

= SystemTap script language changes

- Preprocessor conditional for kernel configuration testing:
  %( CONFIG_foo == "y" %? ... %) 

= SystemTap tapset changes

- ftrace(msg:string) tapset function to send strings to the system-wide
  ftrace ring-buffer (if any).

= New script examples

- interrupt/interrupts-by-dev.stp  Tracks interrupts by device
- io/mbrwatch.stp                  Monitors MBR reads/writes
- memory/vm.tracepoints.stp        Tracks memory slab/slub allocations
- network/tcp_trace.stp            Tcp connection tracing utility
- process/plimit.stp               Prints pid resource limits
- profiling/sched_switch.stp       Display scheduler task switches

= Other notes

- The stap-server initscript is available. This initscript allows you
  to start systemtap compile servers as a system service and to manage
  these servers as a group or individually. The stap-server initscript
  is installed by the systemtap-server rpm.  The build directory for
  the uprobes module (/usr/share/systemtap/runtime/uprobes) is made
  writable by the 'stap-server' group. All of the files generated when
  building the uprobes module, including the digital signature, are
  also writable by members of stap-server.

  See initscript/README.stap-server for details.

- When using the systemtap client and server udp port 5353 must be
  open in your firewall in order for the clent to find servers using
  avahi-browse.

- Some kernel crashes continue to be reported when a script probes
  broad kernel function wildcards.

= Bugs fixed for this release

   4037  make staprun 32/64-bit interoperable
   4571  NFS tests missing from test suite
   5150  buildok/nfs-all-probes.stp fails
   5434  Error processing (missing) nfsservctl syscall
   5872  Scsi tapset needs updation for 2.6.25-rc* kernels
   5890  sys.stp fails on 2.6.25 x86_64
   5916  Exploit kretprobe entry_handler + data pouch?
   6979  loc2c code generation error
   6991  accept system call missed on 2.6.27
   9973  module signing for unprivileged users
  10010  support $globals in shared libraries
  10013  Support ENABLED sdt probe macro
  10015  Possible uninitialized variable use in sym.c
  10081  improve build-id mismatch message
  10099  extend printf %M to support hexdumping large buffers
  10231  Systemtap variable references fail on custom ppc64 kernels
  10390  option to print into systemwide ftrace buffer
  10466  stap -L misrepresents variables available to multi-probe aliases
  10516  on rawhide, getting a warning about bad percpu allocation
  10561  stap-server: take over signing duties, allow arg passing
  10574  Some functions resolve to pc=0x0
  10575  occasional stapio hangs for -c CMD
  10593  Old gcc fails --with-elfutils configure
  10595  uprobe probes causes selinux failures
  10621  init.d script for systemtap-server
  10622  unsuccessful location searches for extern $variables
  10632  Random number generator for .stp
  10644  forward-port staplog
  10650  unprivileged embedded-c functions in tapset
  10653  intermittent itrace crashes
  10658  uprobes uproc->rwsem possible recursive locking detected
  10678  vta-gcc: cannot find module nfs debuginfo
  10700  log() doesn't output newline anymore
  10702  preprocessor directive for kernel CONFIG_foo
  10703  compilation error of ext4 tracepoint on 2.6.32
  10706  line buffering needed in staprun?
  10724  stap should not retry if there is a permissions error
  10726  Getting wrong scope for inlined function
  10746  utrace-less kernels generate funky errors
  10750  translator permits excessively-vararged call into runtime
  10761  pass staprun/stapio verbosity to final staprun -d
  10799  global vs local variable confusion
  10820  stap -L should take varaible location list into account
  10822  procfs file created too late
  10839  KRETACTIVE should have a smaller default value
  10849  make MAXSKIPPED overflow trigger an error message
  10854  Race between script startup and abnormal shutdown
  10866  exit with rc != 0 on script ERRORs
  10869  kretprobes waste a lot of memory on kretprobe_instances
  10877  improve probe point error reporting
  10923  frame_base given by DW_OP_call_frame_cfa in .debug_frame fail
  10927  do-while statement unimplemented, but documented
  10951  Process probes not in language reference manual
  10974  testsuite/buildok/aux_syscalls-embedded.stp failure
  10976  Untrusted uprobes.ko.sig shouldn't be fatal for the privileged
  10981  buildok/netdev.stp failures on rhel5
  10983  Power tracepoints use the wrong header in 2.6.32-rc7
  10984  restrict unprivileged mode operation to "stapusr" or similar
  11015  Support shared library reloading (in different processes)
  11020  SIGUSR2 file switching doesn't work with busy script
  11034  review context struct allocation mechanism
  11089  process.mark() probes with same name trigger wrongly
  11097  debug memory tracker shows memory overwrite in MAXNESTING 
  
= Test results on various systems

- After running "sudo make installcheck" from the test suite, on a
  suitably equipped machine (kernel debugging data and other stuff
  installed), you should see 1000-1100 passes and a small handful of
  failures.