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Re: Fedora 7 based Systemtap LiveCD for i686 machines


William Cohen wrote:
Hi All,

I have been working on a Fedora 7 based liveCD that can be used for
the OLS tutorial.  The process of generating the livecd is getting a
bit easier now that livecd-creator can use a kickstart file to
generate the iso image. I started with the
/usr/share/livecd-tools/livecd-fedora-desktop.ks, verified that I
could build a live CD (and a live usb key flash). Then added the RPMs
for systemtap (systemtap, kernel-devel, kernel-debuginfo). These
additional RPMs pushed the size well over the 700MB limit for a CDROM
(about 1GB). I used to USB flash key to veryify that I could boot the
image and run systemtap. I then started editing the list of packages
on the image to reduce the image size under the 700MB limit.  I ended
up using "yum remove [rpm package]" (with question "n") to determine what
other packages were dependent on a that RPM and ended up with a 687MB
image.

The resulting iso image has been uploaded for other people to test out
at:

ftp://sourceware.redhat.com/pub/systemtap/livecds/Fedora-7-systemtap-20070606.iso


For more information about the livecd tools and creating a livecd:


http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraLiveCD

Attached is the kickstart file (livecd-fedora-7-staptut7.ks) used to
create the livecd on a F7 machine. The following command was run as root to
create the image:

livecd-creator   --config=livecd-fedora-7-staptut8.ks  \
--fslabel=Fedora-7-systemtap-20070606 >& build_stap8.log

Please give it a try and let me know whether how it works.

-Will

There was a question on how much memory is used by the fedora 7 stap livecd when running. This was done on a IBM thinkpad t41 laptop with 512MB of RAM. Here is the output of "free" when just one terminal open on the GUI after boot up:


             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:        514712     508852       5860          0      61552     330872
-/+ buffers/cache:     116428     398284
Swap:            0          0          0


There is still lots of memory available. Output of free when running the an example from the /usr/share/docs/systemtap-0.5.13 directory (kmalloc2.stp) still shows a fair amount of memory available.


             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:        514712     490568      24144          0      48304     300488
-/+ buffers/cache:     141776     372936
Swap:            0          0          0

Given that the livecd doesn't mount swap, it is possible that for some examples to get oom kills if there is a large amount of debug information pulled in by the translator.

-Will


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