help with running systemtap

[Frank Ch. Eigler]

p v <pvlogin@yahoo.com> writes:

> I've read most of the FAQ's on the web (and more) but I still can't
> figure out what's wrong with my setup. I've installed fresh FC9 on
> top of which I did install a debug kernel rpm.

The confusion here is that fedora includes a fully separate "debug"
variant of the kernel that enables lockdep and other functions,
whereas systemtap needs the "-debuginfo" associated with any
particular kernel variant.  So, install "kernel-debug-debuginfo" and
"kernel-debug-devel".

> It's surprising that stap packages are installed although they are
> useless without some additional steps. [...]

One reason for this is that there is no convenient RPM syntax for
systemtap to declare a dependency upon a matching pair of
kernel-*-debuginfo and kernel-*-devel.

> Also how stable is stap? Is it stable enough to be run on production
> machines?

A number of organizations are using it in that capacity.  Most of them
carefully test their scripts first on a development machine.  The
nature of our failures is that things rarely fail on the former if
they worked on the latter.

- FChE