SystemTap

Systemtap provides free software (GPL) infrastructure to simplify the gathering of information about the running Linux system.

Easy and fast

Officially it is recommanded to build a linux-custom package to run systemtap. But rebuild the original linux package can be very easy and efficient.

Prepare

You can run sudo abs; cp -r /var/abs/core/linux . to get the original kernel build files.

Edit config (for 32-bit system) or config.x86_64 (for 64-bit system), turn on this options:

• CONFIG_DEBUG_INFO=y
• CONFIG_KPROBES=y
• CONFIG_RELAY=y
• CONFIG_DEBUG_FS=y
• CONFIG_MODULES=y
• CONFIG_MODULE_UNLOAD=y
• CONFIG_UTRACE=y

By default only CONFIG_DEBUG_INFO and CONFIG_KPROBES is not set.

Suppose you just modified config.x86_64, now save and close it. Run md5sum config.x86_64 to get a new md5-sum.

In PKGBUILD file, the md5sums=('sum-of-first' ... 'sum-of-last') in the end has the same order with source=('first-source' ... 'last-source'), put your new md5sum in the write place.

Build and Install

Optional: you can set MAKEFLAGS="-j16" in /etc/makepkg.conf to speed up the compilation.

Run makepkg to compile, then simply sudo pacman -U *.pkg.tar.gz to install the packages. pacman will tell you reinstall, That's great!

linux and linux-headers should be reinstalled, linux-docs does not matter.

Via this method, external modules (e.g. nvidia and virtualbox) don't need to be rebuild.

Systemtap

simply install systemtap from AUR: systemtap^AUR, all done.

Build custom kernel

Please reference this README