Re: Status of systemtap in Debian
On Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 09:13:06PM +0100, Lucas Nussbaum wrote:
> [ M-F-T set to debian-devel@ ]
>
> Hi,
>
> Systemtap[1] is a tool allowing to dynamically insert probes in the
> Linux kernel, similarly to what is possible with DTrace on Solaris.
> [1] http://sourceware.org/systemtap/
>
> The state of systemtap in Debian is currently worrying. First, the
> package has been orphaned (#568866). I'm willing to take over
> maintenance, but there's another, bigger problem: the Debian kernels
> don't provide debuginfo, so they are unsuitable for use with systemtap.
> Users are required to build a custom kernel.
> This has been discussed at length in #365349, and the blockers are:
>
> - disk space on buildds: at least 2 GiB are required to build a kernel
> with debuginfo. (that doesn't sound too hard to satisfy)
>
> - mirror space: each debug .deb would use ~ 450 MB (see
> http://ddebs.ubuntu.com/pool/main/l/linux/)
>
> Debian is currently the only major distro where users are required to
> build their own kernel to use systemtap, so I think that we should try
> to support it, at least for some kernel flavors and some
> architectures.
>
> Kernel, buildd and mirror people, what do you think?
The kernel team discussed this at our face to face meeting (due to
some prompting from the 'crash' maintainer), and I don't remember any
objections other than those you brought up. We also discussed limiting
the archs/flavors for which we provide debug data to the more popular
images, and those best supported by debug tools like crash, systemtap,
etc). In addition, this data would probably make more sense to store
outside of the normal/widely-mirrored repository (I believe a debug
repo has been discussed before?)
Our next planned step was for me to contact the buildd/ftpmaster teams
about it, which I apparently never did :(
--
dann frazier
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