What is SystemTap?

SystemTap eliminates the need for the developer to go through the tedious and disruptive instrument, recompile, install, and reboot sequence that may be otherwise required to collect data. SystemTap provides a simple command line interface and scripting language for writing instrumentation for a live running kernel plus user-space applications.

How do I deploy SystemTap on Linux?

To deploy SystemTap, install the SystemTap RPM along with the following corresponding packages for your kernel: kernel-uek-debuginfo-common-`uname -r`.rpm SystemTap can run in a limited mode with just the kernel-uek-devel-`uname -r`.rpm package installed.

What do I need to install SystemTap on Arch Linux?

You will need at least the linux-headers package installed. Because Arch permanently strips debugging data from its distributed binaries (including the kernel), many normal/fancier systemtap capabilities are simply not available, so many examples at /usr/share/doc/systemtap/examples will not work.

What is SystemTap debugdwarf mode?

DWARF is the acronym for ‘Debugging With Attribute Record Format’. With the optional debuginfo packages, SystemTap runs in DWARF mode which allows the scripts to make use of source debugging functionality. Download kernel-uek-debuginfo-common-`uname-r`.rpm and kernel-uek-debuginfo-`uname -r`.rpm from Oracle’s public repos: