Phil Muldoon

I’ll continue part 2 of this article on how I built Systemtap from source and installed it.

After I fetched the  source with:

git clone git://sources.redhat.com/git/systemtap.git

A “systemtap” directory with source was created in my pwd. I like to build out-of-tree to keep the source pristine, so I created a new build directory:

mkdir systemtap_obj
cd systemtap_obj

and ran the configure step

../systemtap/configure

On a Fedora 9 LiveCD install, with a few extra custom rpm’s added, I found I had to install some libraries. The steps to install them are all a bit similar, but here is an example of a missing library error I encountered:

 ../systemtap/configure

checking sys/capability.h usability... no
checking sys/capability.h presence... no
checking for sys/capability.h... no
configure: error: cannot find required libcap header (libcap-devel may need to be installed)

And here is how I installed the library to fix for this error:

sudo yum install libcap-devel

I had to rerun the configure script several times to catch all the missing libraries.  In the end I had to install both libcap-devel, and elfutils-devel. Your experience may vary depending on your install.

And finally,  I built Systemtap with:

make

The build took a few minutes. I installed Systemtap with:

sudo make install

The whole process from fetching source, to building it, to installing it took less than five minutes, which was a pleasant surprise.

Tommorrow I’ll take a look at example scripts, but here is a neat example I ran:

sudo stap ~/systemtap/testsuite/systemtap.examples/syscalls_by_proc.stp

Collecting data... Type Ctrl-C to exit and display results

#SysCalls  Process Name

917        thunderbird-bin
807        firefox
489        hal-system-kill
390        tpb
206        dbus-daemon

I decided to write this up as a series of articles. I am really interested in the psychology of an individual becoming interested, using and hopefully participating in an open-source project.  So I decided to journal my experiences in a new project. I always like to dabble in side-projects as a hobby to my main job.  And Systemtap is so close to what I do,  so it became a natural choice.

So here is the first short journal of a newbie’s journey of getting involved with Systemtap.  I’ll keep the dispatches short. A dabbler’s use case, if you will. I’ve always wished that someone would do this for Frysk;  hackers – myself included – can sometimes lose the ground-level  perspective. I constantly worry that our projects are too technical, too complex and oblique to attract new developers. So as a new user of Systemtap, I thought, hey,  time to do what I ask for.

I’ll reproduce a lot of the instructions from the website with some small tweaks. The website for getting started is here:

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

Installing Systemtap from yum on Fedora 9

To install Systemtap from yum on Fedora, as a superuser (or sudo) do:

yum install systemtap kernel-devel

We’ll also need to install the kernel debuginfo packages. It is an important point to stress that  as your kernel updates, you also need to keep the debuginfo packages up to date as well. This caught me a few times, producing unreliable/inaccurate results when a mistmatch occured. To install the debuginfo:

 yum --enablerepo=updates-debuginfo install kernel-debuginfo

This is different than noted on the site. The yum command on the Getting Started Guide also enables my rawhide repo, and it installed the rawhide kernel debuginfo.  Your experience may vary.

And that is it. This will install the last release. And that’s ok. But … if I’m going to participate, I prefer to be at the leading edge. So I’ll be brave, and go straight to the source. Will need git for this, so install that  first:

yum install git

To get the source type this into a shell where you wish to fetch the Systemtap repo.

git clone git://sources.redhat.com/git/systemtap.git

Tomorrow I’ll write about building systemtap and running the examples