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Re: RFC: ideas for release notes for the next release


Hi David,

On Wed, 2009-04-22 at 15:12 -0500, David Smith wrote:
> We wanted to push out a new (0.9.6?) release this week.  Below are
> some suggestions for the release notes. Please read through them and
> suggest additions/fixes.
> 
> The systemtap team announces release 0.9.XXX.

I would start with a short one-paragraph highlights, that news sites can
(re)use. Something like:

"kprobes dwarfless probing, netter uprobes shared library support,
experimental user space unwinding, better static user space .mark
and .label -l listings, improved signal handling (to use stap in
script), tcp packet receive tracing, updates for latest kernel"

Some other improvements not already mentioned:

Language improvements:
 - support up to 9 (up from 5) array index dimensions.
New tapset functions:
 - symname, symdata and modname kernel context functions.
 - errno_p() function that will return an absolute errno if it is valid.
 - ANSI escape sequences tapset
 - New TCP and IP functions, tcp.receive() can be used to trace packets.
New examples:
 - process/errsnoop.stp
   Tabulate system call errors.
 - network/tcp.stp
   A simple TCP tapset example
 - network/tcpdumplike.stp
   Dump of Received TCP Packets
 - network/dropwatch.stp
   Watch Where Socket Buffers are Freed in the Kernel

Other:
- graphing widget (is this enabled by default now?)

I added the following to the NEWS file, which I think might also be
interesting for the announcement:

- EXPERIMENTAL support for user process unwinding. A new collection of
  tapset functions have been added to handle user space backtraces from
  probe points that support them (currently process and timer probes -
  for timer probes test whether or not in user space first with the
  already existing user_mode() function). The new tapset functions are:
    uaddr - User space address of current running task.
    usymname - Return the symbol of an address in the current task.
    usymdata - Return the symbol and module offset of an address.
    print_ustack - Print out stack for the current task from string.
    print_ubacktrace - Print stack back trace for current task.
    ubacktrace - Hex backtrace of current task stack.
  Please read http://sourceware.org/ml/systemtap/2009-q2/msg00364.html
  on the current restrictions and possible changes in the future and
  give feedback if you want to influence future developments.

> = Test results on various systems
> 
>   After running "sudo make installcheck" from the test suite, on a
>   suitably equipped machine (kernel debugging data and other stuff
>   installed), you should see 500-600 passes and a small handful of
>   failures.

800-850 passes and a dozen failures.

Cheers,

Mark


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