SystemTap provides Linux developers and administrators a powerful, low‑overhead dynamic tracing solution that lets you monitor kernel and user‑space events, pinpoint performance bottlenecks, debug crashes, and build custom monitoring without rebooting or recompiling, making invisible system issues visible and solvable.
This article explains how to produce Lua‑level flame graphs for OpenResty by leveraging SystemTap’s lj‑lua‑stacks tool, demonstrates the underlying data structures and call‑stack extraction, and explores a possible eBPF‑based rewrite for safer, kernel‑level tracing.
This guide explains how to monitor disk usage on CentOS 7, collect iostat, sar, and pidstat snapshots, troubleshoot at‑daemon issues, and finally use SystemTap’s inodewatch script together with kernel‑devel and debuginfo packages to pinpoint the exact PID that is writing to a specific file.
This guide explains how to monitor disk usage on a CentOS 7 server, generate periodic snapshots with iostat, sar, and pidstat, schedule them via at, and ultimately locate the exact process writing to a specific file by extracting its inode and tracing it with SystemTap’s inodewatch script, handling kernel‑devel and debuginfo requirements.
This article provides a comprehensive overview of Linux kernel debugging, covering core tools such as printk, ftrace, trace‑cmd, kprobe, systemtap, kgdb, kgtp, perf, as well as pseudo filesystems like procfs, sysfs, debugfs and relayfs, and introduces additional tracers including LTTng, eBPF, Ktap, dtrace4linux, OL DTrace and sysdig.
This comprehensive guide explores Linux kernel debugging essentials, covering pseudo filesystems like procfs, sysfs, debugfs, relayfs, and advanced tracing tools such as ftrace, kprobe, systemtap, perf, KGTP, and LTTng, with practical commands and reference links.
This guide explains how to monitor disk usage on CentOS 7, collect snapshots with iostat, sar and pidstat, troubleshoot common errors, and finally use SystemTap to pinpoint the exact process that is writing to a specific file.
This guide shows how to monitor disk usage on a CentOS 7 server, collect periodic snapshots with iostat, sar and pidstat, troubleshoot atd scheduling issues, and finally use SystemTap to pinpoint the exact PID that writes to a specific file, providing complete scripts and command‑line steps.
This guide explains sandbox fundamentals, compares Windows and Adobe Reader sandboxes, and provides step‑by‑step instructions for installing and configuring a Cuckoo Linux sandbox on Ubuntu, including SystemTap syscall monitoring and signature creation illustrated with a Gonnacry ransomware case study.
Learn a quick, unconventional method to conceal a Linux process from userspace by simply altering its PID with a one‑line SystemTap script, demonstrating how modifying kernel task structures can make the process invisible in procfs and evade standard detection tools.
This guide shows a quick user‑space technique to conceal a Linux process by overwriting its PID with an unused value using a short SystemTap script, includes the exact code, execution steps, detection method, and a brief explanation of why it works.
This article explains how Linux write operations work internally, detailing how data flows from user space through the kernel's page cache to disk, including the timing of actual disk writes and kernel parameters that control writeback behavior.
A detailed performance comparison shows that using input redirection to load a huge MySQL dump is roughly three times faster than piping the file through cat, because the redirection reads the data only once while the pipe incurs extra reads and a context switch, as demonstrated with SystemTap tracing.
This article compares two common MySQL import techniques—piping a large dump through cat versus using input redirection—by measuring execution time and tracing system calls with SystemTap, revealing that redirection can be roughly three times faster due to fewer reads and context switches.
A detailed performance comparison shows that redirecting a huge MySQL dump directly into the client process is roughly three times faster than piping the file through cat, due to fewer system calls and context switches.
This article analyzes two deadlock cases that occur when running Percona‑XtraBackup on a MySQL 5.6 replica, explains the underlying lock interactions, shows how to reproduce the issue with SystemTap, and provides safe remediation steps for operators.
