Re: Discussion at Linux Foundation Japan Symposium

["Jun Koi" <junkoi2004@gmail.com>]

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