How to identify disk abusing process?

dan at geer.org dan at geer.org
Mon Aug 14 12:08:57 EDT 2006


I am no expert on this, but here is what (I believe that)
I know:

The SystemTap package (http://sourceware.org/systemtap/)
is a joint project of Red Hat, IBM, Intel, and Hitachi.
It depends on separate work called "kprobe" which is not
in the current distro but absolutely will be in Rel 5.
Think of kprobe as a mechanism for dynamic breakpoint
insertion.  Torvalds and the sponsors of the SystemTap
project have already made a decision that kprobe and
SystemTap are the long-term direction for the Linux
kernel and the only mechanism that will be in the
kernel source tree.  For kprobe status, see at
http://sourceware.org/systemtap/kprobes-status.html

Installing any custom kernel module voids the support
contracts for many commercial Linux distros (including
RH, IBM, Novell, and for some apps that run on top of
Linux, notably Oracle).  The entire purpose of the
kprobe and SystemTap facilities is to get a way to do
what a CKM would do without having to revoke support
contracts.

--dan




More information about the Discuss mailing list