What are you working on? – Systemtap!

Sometimes people ask me what Red Hat actually pays me for. Aren’t you working on something java related? Although my manager has been very generous and allows me to spend some (but not too much!) time on helping out the free java efforts, my main job is in the engineering tools group (gcc, gdb/Archer [formerly Frysk], binutils, elfutils, oprofile, etc.). Currently I am hacking on Systemtap which has been a lot of (low-level) fun.

LWN just published my article “A Systemtap update” which gives a high level overview of the project through some small examples (all work out of the box on Fedora 10 of course).  It is tucked away on the LWN kernel page, but I tried to show how Systemtap moved beyond the kernel and now provides complete system observability. At the end of the article I point out some of the other work that is being doing around debugging and tracing (elfutils dwarf framework, gcc vta branch, froggy/archer, the user-space breakpoint support layer) to show it is all connected to provide a better debugging and tracing environment for GNU/Linux.