SystemTap and the meaning of life

Back in May, I went to the RedHat Summit in San Diego. Quite an interesting time, really worth my while to fly across the country.

While I was there, the first session that I attended was called "Problem Solving with SystemTap" by Eugene Teo. It seemed like a really interesting toolset, so I just figured that I would learn more about since it's cool and covered in the curriculum for the RH442 class that I'm going to be taking.

SystemTap is a tool for dynamic instrumentation of the Linux kernel. It is comparable to Solaris DTrace. Even without a deep knowledge of kernel internals, one can be doing useful things with SystemTap in relatively short order,

A simple script to tell you what is executing what on the system is below, you can see how simple it really is...

probe syscall.execve {
  printf("%s(pid:%d) called %s and executed %s\n", execname(),pid(), probefunc(), filename)
}