[josefbacik]

Systemtap was fantastic, but super finnicky. You had to have debuginfo for the kernel installed plus the source. This was fine for RHEL but kind of a pain elsewhere. Then you run into other problems like sometimes the distro compiler wasn't used to build the kernel you are running and suddenly you couldn't load any stap script. Also the only way to get output was through stdout, there was no easy way to programmatically pull results from an stap script.

BPF/BCC solves most of this. You still have to have the sources so you can get the right targets for kprobes, but you don't have the compiler mismatch problem. You can now access the hash maps directly from user space so you can do things like build system monitoring tools that run in production and record really specific information easily. I used systemtap for years, but bcc/bpf is a whole new world.

[paxcoder]

You used past tense in talking about a project last committed to less than 3 days ago. I have no horse in this race but it seems to me like you might.

[josefbacik]

Or I just mistyped and you are reading in too much to it?

[ignoramous]

If you mistyped it, pls correct it.

[okket]

You can only edit a post for ~1 hour, his is 3 hours old...

[paxcoder]

It's not a typo, it's a theme driven home by your last sentence.

[kbenson]

And that last sentence makes it obvious why he's using the past tense. Systemtap is in his past. When it was last committed to is irrelevant.

If I was feeling less gracious, I might call into question whether you actually have no horse in this race, as apparently calling other people's motives and statements into question is apparently fair game for this thread.

[paxcoder]

It might have been clear had it been used to set the tone. But used like this I think it deserves criticism whether intentional or not.

While I certainly can be be wrong, I also wasn't assured it wasn't intentional by the way it was explained. I suggest we all mind phrasing and get along this way.

P.S. I don't find it gracious of you to imply that I might be a lying cheat.

[kbenson]

> I don't find it gracious of you to imply that I might be a lying cheat.

I wasn't. I was using the idea that someone could imply that to point out your own behavior. That you took it as negatively as you did and assumed there was some deeper implication was the point (that is, that you could, not that it was intended). The only thing you didn't do is connect it to your own behavior in your prior comment.