SystemTap 3.0 doesn't work on Ubuntu 14.04.4 LTS

[Aleksander Alekseev]

Hello

Today I decided to try SystemTap 3.0. Here is exactly what I did.

For my experiments I created a new KVM virtual machine and installed a
clean Ubuntu 14.04.4 system from ISO image named:

ubuntu-14.04.4-server-amd64.iso

This distribution uses Linux kernel 4.2.0.

At first I tried to use default systemtap package:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install systemtap gcc
sudo apt-get install linux-headers-$(uname -r)

Also I downloaded and installed:

linux-image-4.2.0-27-generic-dbgsym_4.2.0-27.32_amd64.ddeb

... from here http://ddebs.ubuntu.com/pool/main/l/linux/

Unfortunately SystemTap didn't work:

http://pastebin.com/raw/GDry4JWJ

According to copyright message it looks quite old so I decided to try
brand new SystemTap 3.0:

```
sudo apt-get remove systemtap
sudo apt-get install m4 g++ gettext libz-dev
wget https://sourceware.org/systemtap/ftp/releases/systemtap-3.0.tar.gz
wget \
  https://fedorahosted.org/releases/e/l/elfutils/0.159/elfutils-0.159.tar.bz2
tar -xvzf systemtap-3.0.tar.gz
tar -xvjf elfutils-0.159.tar.bz2
cd systemtap-3.0
./configure --with-elfutils=../elfutils-0.159
make -j2
sudo make install
```

As a side node SystemTap 3.0 doesn't compile with newer elfutils 0.165.

It turned out that newer SystemTap doesn't work on this system either:

http://pastebin.com/raw/HvxaxFYw

I found description of these error messages here:


"""
Error -84 is EILSEQ: "illegal byte sequence". The kernel can return
this signal, for example if it cannot decode its own binary in the
region nearby the requested kprobe, or it finds instruction patterns
that its decoder has not been taught to handle. It's not a systemtap
bug.
"""

-- 
Best regards,
Aleksander Alekseev
http://eax.me/