static probes

[Jose R. Santos]

Frank Ch. Eigler wrote:

>To place a probe on such a marker, the CVS systemtap now understands
>    probe kernel.mark("name") { ... }
>or  probe module("m").mark("name") { ... }
>Wildcards in the names are supported as usual.  For these probes,
>systemtap does NOT require/use debugging information, so we're not
>at the mercy of gcc.
>  
>
Sounds interesting.  Would it be possible for SystemTap to check for the 
availability of a static probe before reverting to kprobing a kernel 
function?  The reason I ask is that for LKET, fast static probe that can 
be inserted anywhere  would be useful for our trace hooks, but if the 
kernel lack a particular static probe but the same probe can dynamically 
iinserted, then we can use the alternative dynamic probe with out 
requiring changes to the LKET code to handle both scenarios.

-JRS