SystemTap GUI User Guide | ||
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SystemTap IDE |
Welcome to the SystemTapGUI Help pages. This section is intended to provide users with information and links about the SystemTap scripting language itself, in addition to a brief introduction to SystemTap GUI's structure for new users and a brief explanation of SystemTap.
SystemTap GUI was built with a modular goal in mind, namely, to provide the application as a series of plugins so that users may obtain just the ones they need without having to use a heavy-weight application should if they didn't need to. The most common example of this is to ship the Dashboard plugin independently, allowing non-SystemTap savvy users the ability to execute modules without having to write any scripts. The application in its complete state includes three perspective, each with a specific goal:
Each perspective has full documentation associated with it and is packaged in the respective plugin.
SystemTap provides free software (GPL) infrastructure to simplify the gathering of information about the running Linux kernel. This assists diagnosis of a performance or functional problem. SystemTap eliminates the need for the developer to go through the tedious and disruptive instrument, recompile, install, and reboot sequence that may be otherwise required to collect data.
SystemTap provides a simple command line interface and scripting language for writing instrumentation for a live running kernel. The internal tapset library as well as the published samples can be used to aid reuse and abstraction.
Current project members include Red Hat, IBM, Intel, and Hitachi.
This tutorial is written to guide a new SystemTap GUI user through some basic post-installation setup in order to get the most out of the application.
This section details the steps required for the installation of Systemtap GUI on the user's machine.
Hardware Requirements:
Sotware Requirements:
The Gui is a client-server application and the server and client can be installed seperately. The client is an eclipse plugin and requires eclipse to be installed. It provides an IDE to write scripts and a visualizer to view the output in graphical form.
The server (stapgui-server) provides stdout/stderr data collection and process management services for processes run on a remote system. The server executes the SystemTap script, collects all output to stderr and stdout from that process, then funnels it via a socket to the client.
The client and server can be installed on machines with different architectures.This allows users to monitor remote machines. You may also download and build the source yourself.
NOTE: The client and server are seperate packages and need to be installed independently. You are viewing this help on the eclipse based client.
NOTE: Installation assumes you already have both Eclipse and SystemTap installed.
Eg on Fedora run the command: yum install systemtapguiserver
Eg on Fedora run the command: yum install eclipse-systemtapgui
In order to use the kernel source browser you'll need to point it to the kernel source initially. Do this by either selecting the Kernel Source Browser in the browser pane or by going to Window->Preferences, then going to the SystemTap->IDE->Path tab and setting the location there. This configuration detail is relevent to the IDE Perspective only.
If you haven't already, you will want to take the IDE and Graphing tutorials. You can find them in the Getting Started section of each perspective's help pages. These tutorial provides fundamental knowledge on graphing in SystemTap GUI.
Finally, you may want to set certain non-essential preferences before using SystemTap GUI regularly. Use Window->Preferences to access the Preferences page.
Of particular note are Logging->Log To, SystemTap->Environment Variables, SystemTap->Graphing->Refresh Delay, SystemTap->IDE->Editor->Syntax Coloring.
The following links contain information specific to the SystemTap scripting language.
The following links are related to the SystemTap GUI project:
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SystemTap IDE |