Re: Getting started: trying to build a kernel tracing tool for viewing assembly code

[William Cohen <wcohen at redhat dot com>]

Dan Connors wrote:
> I'm just getting started with SystemTap: trying to build a kernel
> tracing tool for viewing assembly code
> as well as memory addresses.  I am looking to do this on the Itanium
> (IA-64) architecture. I have a lot ahead of me in terms of existing
> documents.  I am wondering if someone had general suggestions on
> getting started on this project and if there was a good starting
> point.
>
> Any links are greatly appreciated.
>
> thanks.
>
> Dan

Hi Dan,

There was some recent discussion about instruction trace support for systemtap:

http://sources.redhat.com/ml/systemtap/2007-q3/msg00014.html

Is that the type of tracing you had in mind?  You might also take a look at the 
IBM tool:

http://perfinsp.sourceforge.net/itrace.html


The memory address are those the instruction addresses or data addresses? The 
data addresses might be much harder to obtain. There was some work done at NCSU 
by Jesse Beu on a master's thesis using the performance monitoring hardware to 
monitor data access patterns. Computing the data memory address accessed when 
sampling instructions was not trivial.

Last I checked sysemtap functioned on ia64 machine running Red Hat Enterprise 
Linux 4 update 5. You probably want to make sure that you have things set up 
locally to run prepackaged version of systemtap. Probably main stumbling point 
is getting the correct kernel-debuginfo.

The source repository is available to anyone and there is some information about 
 developing systemtap at:

http://sourceware.org/systemtap/getinvolved.html

-Will