Date: Tue, 15 Mar 2011 01:22:24 +0100 (CET)
From: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
To: Andi Kleen <andi@firstfloor.org>
cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>,
        Srikar Dronamraju <srikar@linux.vnet.ibm.com>,
        Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>, Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>,
        Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org>, Linux-mm <linux-mm@kvack.org>,
        Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@infradead.org>,
        Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>,
        Masami Hiramatsu <masami.hiramatsu.pt@hitachi.com>,
        Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>,
        Ananth N Mavinakayanahalli <ananth@in.ibm.com>,
        Oleg Nesterov <oleg@redhat.com>,
        Jim Keniston <jkenisto@linux.vnet.ibm.com>,
        Roland McGrath <roland@hack.frob.com>,
        SystemTap <systemtap@sources.redhat.com>,
        LKML <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
        "Paul E. McKenney" <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH v2 2.6.38-rc8-tip 0/20] 0: Inode based uprobes
In-Reply-To: <20110314234754.GP2499@one.firstfloor.org>
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References: <20110314133403.27435.7901.sendpatchset@localhost6.localdomain6> <20110314163028.a05cec49.akpm@linux-foundation.org> <20110314234754.GP2499@one.firstfloor.org>
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On Tue, 15 Mar 2011, Andi Kleen wrote:

> > IOW, I'm trying to get an understanding of how you expect this feature
> > will actually become useful to end users - the kernel patch is only
> > part of the story.
> 
> One user would be systemtap for user tracing as I understand. Systemtap has a 
> userbase (at least I use it, although not for user tracing)

That's a brilliant reason to drop it right away. systemtap is the
least of our worries.
 
> Right now lots of distros apply ugly patchkits to handle this instead,
> which is not good (tm).

s/lots of distros/some enterprise distros where the management still
believes that this is a valuable feature add/

You deliberately skipped the first part of akpms question:

> How do you envisage these features actually get used?  For example,
> will gdb be modified?  Will other debuggers be modified or written?

How about answering this question first _BEFORE_ advertising
systemtap?

Thanks,

	tglx
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