SystemTap in Fedora 12

Date	Status report
2009-09-24	Contacted Will Cohen for interview, score!
Next action: Write questions, send link to Will, and schedule podcast interview time.

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Interviews

Print interview

Conducted with Will Cohen of Red Hat.

Introduce yourself and since not all readers may be familiar with SystemTap, tell us about what it is and how it's used.

(Answer here)

Are there similar tools that a developer might use on other, non-Linux platforms? What about similar tools on Linux? How does SystemTap compare with those tools?

(Answer here)

All right, let's dive into some details. In Fedora 12 SystemTap has been extended to offer kernel tracepoint support. What are kernel tracepoints, and how does this feature help developers?

ditto

We keep hearing about "dwarf debuginfo," and that SystemTap supports this format. What's changed from previous kinds of debuginfo?

ditto

There's also some work that's been done to make SystemTap work with Eclipse, a development environment that's used by many developers. How does that integration work, and how would a developer use it?

ditto

We gather this isn't the final endpoint of SystemTap development, because the feature page mentions static probes. Can you explain what those are, how they'll work, and when we might see them in SystemTap?

ditto

Where would developers read more about SystemTap? Is there much documentation on how to put it to practical use?

ditto

What do you do when you're not hacking on SystemTap or other tools?

ditto

Thanks for your time, Will -- we're looking forward to seeing SystemTap among the many advancements in Fedora 12 in November!