systemtap on 2009.1

Today I decided to have a play with systemtap and see if it worked on 2009.1, since it’s quite a need tool that Fedora has had for some time.  Luckly enough, it looked like the was an RPM available for it, so installed it and gave it a go..  no such luck.  The rpm is old and builds c code that won’t compile against the current kernel.  The way systemtap works, is it takes a system tap script  and compiles this script into C, It then compiles the C against the current kernel to build a kernel module, which is then loaded into the running kernel.

Not to be deterred by an out of date package (bug logged), I downloaded systemtap 0.9 from http://sourceware.org/systemtap/ftp/releases/ and compiled it.   (required: lib64elfutils-static-devel, gcc-c++).   It  requires quite a lot of the kernel files, so installed kernel-server-debug, kernel-server-devel.

After that, it worked pretty well,  I downloaded a few of the examples, like nettop.stp, which will output a nice top of network traffic by process. for example:

# stap nettop.stp
PID    UID DEV     XMIT_PK RECV_PK XMIT_KB RECV_KB COMMAND
10219  500 eth0        101      67      19      73 firefox
0        0 eth0         55      92       3      46 swapper
2863     0 eth0         27      28       1      26 X
3583   500 eth0         13       4       5       0 sshd
3582    76 eth0          7       2       2       0 sshd
2913     0 eth0          4       4       0       0 python
2996     0 eth0          2       2       0       0 nmbd
4205   500 eth0          1       1       0       0 net_applet