Discussion at Linux Foundation Japan Symposium

[Jun Koi]

On Thu, Dec 18, 2008 at 6:06 PM, jidong xiao <jidong.xiao@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 18, 2008 at 4:57 PM, Jun Koi <junkoi2004@gmail.com> wrote:
>> 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
>>
> But not every distribution contains kernel debuginfo packages,
> therefore this makes many people not easy to use systemtap.
>

But my question is: how can we survive without debug info? In that
case, we cannot tap into kernel anymore? (I guess tap on userspace
still works)


Thanks,
Jun