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Revision as of 20:04, 5 February 2013 by Jreznik (talk | contribs) (Moved to FeatureReadyForFesco for approval (#1065))

Systemtap 2.2

Summary

A new feature release of Systemtap

Owner

  • Email: lberk@redhat.com fche@redhat.com

Current status

  • Targeted release: Fedora 19
  • Last updated: 2013-01-28
  • Percentage of completion: 25.31459%
  • systemtap version 2.1 is due early February, aiming 2.2 soon thereafter for F19

Detailed Description

Systemtap 2.2 will introduce several new features:

  • Native Java per-method probing capabilities (using byteman)

Plus new features coming from the impending systemtap 2.1:

  • A suite of error-explanation man pages.
  • Perf event probes may now be read on demand
  • Perf event probes may now be bound to a specific task using the process name
  • The dyninst backend's runtime has been improved to allow much more concurrency when probing multi-threaded processes

Benefit to Fedora

This update further expands systemtap's native probing domain and capabilities, allowing for diagnosis and analysis of a greater variety of situations.

Scope

Only the systemtap packages would be modified.

How To Test

Testing will be completed by additional test cases within the systemtap testsuite. These tests are being added as the features are being developed.

User Experience

Users will be able to leverage the new features by specifying the expanded language syntax in their script or specified command line options.

Dependencies

  • Dyninst portions of systemtap rely on the dyninst rpm (maintained by Josh Stone)
  • Native, per-method java probing makes use of the byteman packge (maintained by Marek Goldmann)

Contingency Plan

In the event that not all the proposed features are contributed to upstream systemtap, then the then-latest version of systemtap will be used.

Documentation

Systemtap provides man pages for errors, warnings, build-in functions, probe points, and tapsets. In addition, systemtap packages examples, and helpful scripts, which describe proper coding style and notation.

Online Systemtap Documentation

Systemtap Beginners Guide

Systemtap Language Reference

Release Notes

Systemtap routinely provides detailed release notes with each release, this trend is expected to continue and Fedora can use upstream's release notes in place. Draft systemtap 2.1 release notes

Comments and Discussion