Linux guru offers sneak peek at Kernel Report

What distribution do you use on your own machines, and do you use the distribution supplied kernel on them or not?

I run a different distribution on every machine I have, just as a way of seeing what everybody is up to. I also try not to endorse specific distributions. I will say, though, that the desktop that I'm typing on at the moment is running Rawhide - the Fedora development repository. The laptop I'll take to linux.conf.au has Ubuntu Gutsy, though I may jump onto the Hardy development repository before I travel. Development distributions keep me on the front line of the development process, which is a fun (and sometimes terrifying) place to be.

Once upon a time, I built custom kernels for every machine I deployed; back in the early 1.x days it was almost mandatory. Now I stick with stock kernels on most machines. My desktop is always running the current development kernel, though, so that I can be part of the testing community and make changes of my own. I have a strong belief that, while any testing is good, the best testing is using the software to get real work done. There's a lot of problems which just don't come up in any other situation.

Do people want more Dtrace or have they accepted SystemTap is the way to go?

What people want is a rock-solid tracing facility that is usable by operations staff. Dtrace has a lot of the needed features, so people ask for it. I believe that, in many ways, SystemTap is an even more powerful mechanism than Dtrace, but it is currently rough around the edges and difficult to use. So, in a very real sense, SystemTap does not, at this time, satisfy the needs being expressed by a wide range of users.

The good news is that work is being done to make SystemTap better. As we used to say in engineering school: the first 90% is done, now the developers just have to do the other 90% of making it usable. To that end, features like static markers have recently gone into the mainline kernel, making it possible to create a standard set of tracepoints that anybody can use without having to actually know the kernel code. A year from now, SystemTap (and the other tracing packages currently under development) should be more than good enough. I hope. But we're not there now.