Re: New Systemtap-0.8 RPM available for testing on Fedora 8 and Fedora 9

[Mark Wielaard <mjw at redhat dot com>]

Hi Will,

On Wed, 2008-11-19 at 14:41 -0500, William Cohen wrote:
> If you are like Roland  and looking for a newer version of the Systemtap RPMs 
> for Fedora, you are in luck. The newer Systemtap 0.8 RPMs are now available for 
> testing on Fedora 8 and Fedora 9.

Nice! Have tested a bit against the latest f9 kernel,
2.6.27.5-41.fc9.x86_64 Seems to work fine. And the user probes working
out of the box now is great.

I couldn't figure out how to run the tests against the
systemtap-testsuite package. Would like to run those to see how things
look in the larger picture. How do you run them from the rpm?

One usability nit. If you have setup a stapdev group then if you run
anything with user probes for the first time you will get:

  SystemTap's version of uprobes is out of date.
  As root, run "make" in /usr/share/systemtap/runtime/uprobes.
  Pass 4: compilation failed.  Try again with more '-v' (verbose)
  options.

While running it if you are in sudoers with sudo, will just
automagically do the right thing for you without any manual
intervention. Not so much a bug, just a strange usability issue.
I don't know much about packaging, but would it be possible to rebuild
uprobes whenever a new kernel or systemtap rpm is installed?

Cheers,

Mark