SystemTap at Fosdem

[Mark Wielaard <mjw at redhat dot com>]

Hi all,

Last weekend was the Fosdem conference in Brussels. It was a massive
event, with possibly 5000+ hackers. I gave a talk about getting more
observability of what java does through SystemTap integration with
Hotspot. There were a couple of other talks about SystemTap that sounded
fun, but which I sadly missed. There was some negative stop energy
during one of the kernel talks by Jon Corbet, where SystemTap was
presented as a kind of failure, which I found somewhat unfair (I asked
Jon afterwards how to change that image, but he didn't know). But some
of the people I spoke to afterwards said they didn't really get what
Jon's problem really was. They all had attended my talk, so had a
different view of being successful than some kernel hackers might have
had. Apart from that, I got lots of positive feedback and it seems lots
of people are actually happily using SystemTap out there.

I put my slides on the wiki:
Observing HotSpot with SystemTap
http://www.fosdem.org/2011/schedule/event/systemtap
http://sourceware.org/systemtap/wiki/HomePage?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=hotspot-stap.pdf
(Sadly I found a regression on my way to Fosdem. Some symbols we use in
the jstack.stp script had changed in the new Hotspot version, and I
wasn't able to fix it before the demo. Instead I tried to explain the
bug, but I should just have given a different demo. I added another
example to the published slides instead.)

The other two talks about SystemTap at Fosdem were:

BOFH meets SystemTap: rootkits made trivial
Adrien Kunysz
http://www.fosdem.org/2011/schedule/event/systemtap_talk
http://www.opensc-project.org/opensc/raw-attachment/wiki/FOSDEM2011/systemtap-bofh-fosdem2011020501.pdf

Tracing Perl with DTrace/SystemTap
David Leadbeater
http://fosdem.org/2011/schedule/event/tracing_perl
https://dgl.cx/2011/01/dtrace-and-perl
Mostly about dtrace, but mentions that systemtap is compatible.

I also heard SystemTap was mentioned in one of the Mozilla talks, but
don't know precisely which one. I believe it was about this systemtap
script tracking I/O to figure out how much disk seeks hurt:
http://glandium.org/blog/?p=1665

Cheers,

Mark