Michael Dolan Dot Com

Thursday, January 19th, 2006

Installing SystemTap on Gentoo

Ok, I’ve posted about looking at SystemTap before. It let’s you perform deep probing of a running kernel and provides insights for tuning or troubleshooting. I’ve been watching the development lists and it looks like they will be adding in the user space probes soon. Once those are ready we can use SystemTap to watch what’s happening in a running application from the user space into the kernel and back. Great Stuff.. Ok, enough advertising for the team.

Prereqs: Turn on in your kernel: kprobes, relayfs, debugging info

To setup SystemTap on Gentoo:

1) Copy the source down from CVS

2) ./configure then make and then make install

3) You will find stap in /usr/local/bin -> may want to add to your PATH.

4) I had to add a symlink at /lib/modules/2.6.14-gentoo-r5mdolan/vmlinux pointing to /usr/src/linux-2.6.14-gentoo-r5/vmlinux

You should be up and running now. We’ll have to get an ebuild up soon. Join the developer mailing list - they can provide quick help if you have a question. Looking for an introduction? This article might help.