Fedora 7 based Systemtap LiveCD for i686 machines

[William Cohen]

William Cohen wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> I have been working on a Fedora 7 based liveCD that can be used for
> the OLS tutorial.  The process of generating the livecd is getting a
> bit easier now that livecd-creator can use a kickstart file to
> generate the iso image. I started with the
> /usr/share/livecd-tools/livecd-fedora-desktop.ks, verified that I
> could build a live CD (and a live usb key flash). Then added the RPMs
> for systemtap (systemtap, kernel-devel, kernel-debuginfo). These
> additional RPMs pushed the size well over the 700MB limit for a CDROM
> (about 1GB). I used to USB flash key to veryify that I could boot the
> image and run systemtap. I then started editing the list of packages
> on the image to reduce the image size under the 700MB limit.  I ended
> up using "yum remove [rpm package]" (with question "n") to determine what
> other packages were dependent on a that RPM and ended up with a 687MB
> image.
> 
> The resulting iso image has been uploaded for other people to test out
> at:
> 
> ftp://sourceware.redhat.com/pub/systemtap/livecds/Fedora-7-systemtap-20070606.iso 
> 
> 
> For more information about the livecd tools and creating a livecd:
> 
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraLiveCD
> 
> Attached is the kickstart file (livecd-fedora-7-staptut7.ks) used to
> create the livecd on a F7 machine. The following command was run as root to
> create the image:
> 
> livecd-creator   --config=livecd-fedora-7-staptut8.ks  \
> --fslabel=Fedora-7-systemtap-20070606 >& build_stap8.log
> 
> Please give it a try and let me know whether how it works.
> 
> -Will

There was a question on how much memory is used by the fedora 7 stap livecd when 
running.  This was done on a IBM thinkpad t41 laptop with 512MB of RAM.  Here is 
the output of "free" when just one terminal open on the GUI after boot up:

              total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:        514712     508852       5860          0      61552     330872
-/+ buffers/cache:     116428     398284
Swap:            0          0          0


There is still lots of memory available. Output of free when running the an 
example from the /usr/share/docs/systemtap-0.5.13 directory (kmalloc2.stp) still 
shows a fair amount of memory available.

              total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:        514712     490568      24144          0      48304     300488
-/+ buffers/cache:     141776     372936
Swap:            0          0          0

Given that the livecd doesn't mount swap, it is possible that for some examples 
to get oom kills if there is a large amount of debug information pulled in by 
the translator.

-Will