SystemTap release 0.9.8

From: Josh Stone
Date: Thu Jun 11 2009 - 21:03:22 EST


The SystemTap team proudly announces release 0.9.8.

Module signing, debuginfo package suggestions, system call dwarfless
probing, new tapset functions, support for 2.6.30 kernels, and many
bug fixes and miscellaneous speed improvements.

= Where to get it

http://sourceware.org/systemtap/ - our project page
http://sourceware.org/systemtap/ftp/releases/systemtap-0.9.8.tar.gz
http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/packageinfo?packageID=615
git tag release-0.9.8 (commit e1774a7f)

= How to build it

See the README and NEWS files at
http://sourceware.org/git/?p=systemtap.git;a=tree
Further information at http://sourceware.org/systemtap/wiki/

= SystemTap frontend (stap) changes

- Module signing: If the appropriate nss libraries are available on your
system, stap will sign each compiled module using a self-generated
certificate. This is the first step toward extending authority to
load certain modules to unprivileged users. For now, if the system
administrator adds a certificate to a database of trusted signers
(stap-authorize-signing-cert), modules signed using that certificate
will be verified by staprun against tampering. Otherwise, you should
notice no difference in the operation of stap or staprun.

- Debuginfo suggestions: If a script fails in some way due to missing
debugging information, stap will try to query rpm for which package
supplied that binary and suggest the matching debuginfo packages to
install.

= SystemTap script language changes

- Using %M in print formats for hex dumps can now print entire buffers,
instead of just small numbers.

= SystemTap tapset changes

- Dwarfless syscalls: The nd_syscalls tapset is now available to probe
system calls without requiring kernel debugging information. All of
the same probepoints in the normal syscalls tapset are available with
an "nd_" prefix, e.g. syscall.open becomes nd_syscall.open. Most
syscall arguments are also available by name in nd_syscalls.

- Miscellaneous new functions:
- sid() returns the session ID of the current process
- stringat() indexes a single character from a string.

= New script examples

- io/ttyspy.stp Monitor tty typing
- process/schedtimes.stp Track time processes spend in various states

= Code contributors for this release

Ananth N Mavinakayanahalli, Dave Brolley, David Smith, Don Domingo,
Elliott Baron, Eugeniy Meshcheryakov, Frank Ch. Eigler, Jim Keniston,
JoeLynn Keniston, Josh Stone, Kai Meyer, Keiichi KII, Kent Sebastian,
Malte Nuhn, Mark Wielaard, Masami Hiramatsu, Petr Muller, Przemyslaw
Pawelczyk, Stan Cox, Sunzen Wang, Wenji Huang, William Cohen

= Examples of tested kernel versions

2.6.9 (el4/i386)
2.6.18 (el5/ia64/i686/x86_64-xen)
2.6.27.21 (f10/i686/x86_64)
2.6.29.4 (f11/i586/x86_64)
2.6.30 (i686/x86_64)

= Known issues with this release

Some kernel crashes continue to be reported when a script probes broad
kernel function wildcards.

= Bugs fixed for this release

3347 undesirable embedded-C functions at top level
5630 support for single-stepping in user-space
5635 unwind-data-based backtracing for userspace
6930 Flight Recorder on file
6933 Individual kprobes enable/disable support
9997 provide run-time advice on how to install needed debuginfo
10007 Some SystemTap tests need updates to handle SYSCALL_WRAPPERS
10082 add environment variable to pass -r RELEASE/PATH option
10091 Backward compatibility for insn probe point (itrace) on o...
10102 optional probe points should silently accept "probe point...
10117 on ppc64, tapset/context.stp is broken on older kernels
10130 Argument to mktemp should have at least 6 X's
10139 .probes section disappears into debuginfo
10172 sdt.h on powerpc Error: junk at end of line: `0'
10177 _stp_kill_time on RT-kernel hits BUG
10182 systemtap.spec should clean up old leftover runtime/uprobes/
10185 stap uprobe script on rawhide causes system crash
10190 Suppress registration warnings for optional probes
10206 symname() resolves incorrect symbols on ppc
10209 extend configury for --disable-translator
10232 backtrace through kretprobes via fallback unwinder
10260 Crash due to stale timer callbacks

= Test results on various systems

After running "sudo make installcheck" from the test suite, on a
suitably equipped machine (kernel debugging data and other stuff
installed), you should see 800-850 passes and a small handful of
failures.
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