Sunday, February 21, 2010

Building Systemtap on Ubuntu

How quickly software rots! Systemtap is a tool for monitoring the kernel in Linux. You write scripts in a C or javascript like language and use a debug version of your kernel, and the scripts get compiled into code and the code monitors the system in the way specified, a bit like a set of debug statements in an IDE.

So I wanted to use a script written by D Wilder at IBM (tcpipstat) for monitoring throughput on a per socket basis. You can't do this without systemtap or without hacking the kernel (harder). Unfortunately the script does not run using the version installed by the latest version of Ubuntu, Karmic Koala (9.10). Apparently missing are some 'tapsets', specifically tcpmib.stp and a few others. So, I thought, I would compile my own version of systemtap. So I downloaded the latest version using git from the repository and tried to compile that. It needed a version of elf-utils-dev, which is not available for Ubuntu. So I had to download the full source code of elfutils. Then I passed into the configure script the option --with-elfutils=/path/to/elfutils. (I still have no idea why they say configure with '--disable-pie' on Ubuntu).

Configure complained that 'missing', which is a script, had a bad format. Turned out to be the carriage returns were DOS not UNIX. So I downloaded flip and fixed that. Now configure worked but make failed with the obscure error 'configure.lineno xxx: bad substitution'. I had no idea and Googling made little difference. I decided I had had enough and downloaded a 'release' of systemtap, version 0.9.5, which I thought was the latest. Same problem. Then I found a post that hinted I should substitute /bin/bash for /bin/sh as the shell for the configure script. I did and it worked. But tcpmib.stp was not installed! It seems that this was introduced in 0.9.9, and I needed the latest code. I downloaded that and rebuilt and hey presto, it worked!

Version 1.1 in fact builds without a glitch. The problem was trying to use a version that was just 11 months old, though you do need elfutils.

1 comment:

  1. I'm sorry to hear of your earlier stap building problems. Whereever those DOS CRLF's came from, it wasn't systemtap's committed source code. Perhaps your git client is DOSifying the files.

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