A report from OpenSQLCamp

Posted Nov 3, 2010 12:57 UTC (Wed) by mjw (subscriber, #16740) [Link]

I wish people were not mislead into thinking that this ("inclusion in the linux kernel") was at all necessary to use systemtap.

The same is kind of implied in another LWN article about stable kernel interfaces too:

Another way of putting it, he said, is that, if you still want people to try out an ABI, you should not be asking him to pull it. In general, it can be better if new interfaces stay out of the kernel for a while. SystemTap was given as an example here: according to Linus, time has shown that the SystemTap interface is not a good one. He's very glad he never pulled it into the kernel. The lesson is that it's a good idea to impose a certain amount of pain on people who want to create new interfaces; let them live out of the mainline for a while.

It is as if SystemTap itself should somehow be pulled into the kernel, while SystemTap of course works fine outside it (seeing that it is mainly a user space program anyway). It is just that the kernel could make life for SystemTap easier by integrating some sane interfaces to use. Which is actually slowly happening. If the kernel interfaces for tracing and probing improve systemtap will obviously just adapt to use them.

BTW. Some nice articles about using SystemTap with SQLite/PostgreSQL/MySQL:

• performance annotated SQLite EXPLAINation visualizations using systemtap
• probing postgresql
• Monitoring Drizzle or MySQL With DTrace and SystemTap