Regarding systemtap support for AArch64

[William Cohen]

On 10/14/2013 10:29 PM, Sandeepa Prabhu wrote:
> Hi Will,
> 
> Thanks for the details, so we have 2 more options (qemu and uefi
> image) to try out. I would get back to you once tried out the options,
> and then decide what's best for kprobes <-> systemtap validation.
> Bit of challenge for me is that I have Ubuntu host - running yum upon
> that!,  not sure of any cross-development issues, but as for aarch64
> native building(on fc19-aarch64 model itself) this should be okay
> though its very slow.
> 
> Thanks,
> Sandeepa

Hi Sandeepa,

If you have things on ubuntu image, the information on the wiki might be helpful in setting up systemtap development build:

https://sourceware.org/systemtap/wiki/SystemtapOnUbuntu

The following is a general description of building systemtap:

https://sourceware.org/git/?p=systemtap.git;a=blob_plain;f=README;hb=HEAD

Yes, building systemtap on the foundation model is very slow.  One thing to avoid slowing things down further is to disable documentation building. Here is what I am using on my image to configure things:

 ./configure --disable-docs --prefix=/home/wcohen/systemtap_write/install

One other caveat that may (or may not) be an issue is whether the native compiler include a neon header file. The lack of neon header caused a problem with some of the native kernel builds and there were some patches that had to be put in. I beleive that the following directory has a source rpm with the needed patch:

http://arm-temp.ausil.us/pub/fedora-arm/stage4/gcc-4.8.1-10.x1.fc19/

The following is the related fedora bugzilla entry for it:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1007490

-Will