Chapter 6. References

The SystemTap Wiki is a collection of links and articles related to the deployment, usage, and development of SystemTap. You can find it at http://sourceware.org/systemtap/wiki/HomePage.

Much of the content in this book comes from the SystemTap Tutorial. The SystemTap Tutorial is a more appropriate reference for users with intermediate to advanced knowledge of C++ and kernel development, and can be found at http://sourceware.org/systemtap/tutorial/.

The stapprobes man page enumerates a variety of probe points supported by SystemTap, along with additional aliases defined by the SystemTap tapset library. The bottom of the man page includes a list of other man pages enumerating similar probe points for specific system components, such as stapprobes.scsi, stapprobes.kprocess, stapprobes.signal, etc.

The stapfuncs man page enumerates numerous functions supported by the SystemTap tapset library, along with the prescribed syntax for each one. Note, however, that this is not a complete list of all supported functions; there are more undocumented functions available.

This document is a comprehensive reference of SystemTap's language constructs and syntax. It is recommended for users with a rudimentary to intermediate knowledge of C++ and other similar programming languages. The SystemTap Language Reference is available to all users at http://sourceware.org/systemtap/langref/

Once you have sufficient proficiency in writing SystemTap scripts, you can then try your hand out on writing your own tapsets. The Tapset Developers Guide describes how to add functions to your tapset library.

The systemtap-testsuite package allows you to test the entire SystemTap toolchain without having to build from source. In addition, it also contains numerous examples of SystemTap scripts you can study and test; some of these scripts are also documented in Chapter 4, Useful SystemTap Scripts.

By default, the example scripts included in systemtap-testsuite are located in /usr/share/systemtap/testsuite/systemtap.examples.