Aaron Merey

Because bugs are inevitable, developers need quick and easy access to the artifacts that debugging tools like Systemtap and GDB depend on, which are typically DWARF (Debugging With Attributed Record Formats) debuginfo or source files. Accessing these resources should not be an issue when debugging your own local build tree, but all too often they are not readily available. For example, your distro might package debuginfo and source files separately from the executable you're trying to debug and you may...

Compared to SystemTap's default backend, one of stapbpf's most distinguishing features is the absence of a kernel module runtime. The BPF machinery inside the kernel instead mostly handles its runtime. Therefore it would be very helpful if BPF provided us with a way for states to be maintained across multiple invocations of BPF programs and for userspace programs to be able to communicate with BPF programs. This is accomplished by BPF maps. In this blog post, I will introduce BPF...

SystemTap 3.2 includes an early prototype of SystemTap's new BPF backend (stapbpf). It represents a first step towards leveraging powerful new tracing and performance analysis capabilities recently added to the Linux kernel. In this post, I will compare the translation process of stapbpf with the default backend (stap) and compare some differences in functionality between these two backends. Stap and stapbpf share common parsing and semantic analysis stages. As input for translation, both backends receive data structures representing a parse...