To deploy Systemtap, you will need to to install the following RPMs:

Assuming that your system is configured to use Red Hat Network (RHN) or yum is available, these two rpms can be installed with yum install systemtap systemtap-runtime. Note that before you can use SystemTap, you will still need to install the required kernel information RPMs.

SystemTap needs information about the kernel in order to place instrumentation in it (i.e. probe it). This information also allows SystemTap to generate the code for the instrumentation. This information is contained in the matching -devel and -debuginfo packages for your kernel. The necessary -devel and -debuginfo packages for the ordinary "vanilla" kernel are as follows:

Likewise, the necessary packages for the PAE kernel would be kernel-PAE-debuginfo, kernel-PAE-debuginfo-common, and kernel-PAE-devel.

To determine what kernel your system is currently using, use:

uname -r

For example, if you wish to use SystemTap on kernel version 2.6.18-53.el5 on an i686 machine, then you would need to download and install the following RPMs:

stapprep.sh

#! /bin/bash
check_error() { if test $1 != 0; then echo $2; exit $1; fi }

if [ "$#" -lt 1 ]; then
    UNAME=`uname -r` # determine the kernel running on the machine
else
    UNAME=$1 #user passed in uname value
fi
UNAME=`echo $UNAME | sed "s/ //"` #strip out any whitespace
KERNEL="kernel"
for VARIANT in debug kdump PAE xen; do
  TMP=`echo $UNAME | sed s/$VARIANT//`
  if [ "$TMP" != "$UNAME" ]; then
      UNAME=$TMP; KERNEL="kernel-$VARIANT"
  fi
done
KERN_ARCH=`uname -m`
KERN_REV=`echo $UNAME | sed s/.$KERN_ARCH//` # strip arch from uname
CANDIDATES="$KERNEL-$KERN_REV.$KERN_ARCH \
  $KERNEL-devel-$KERN_REV.$KERN_ARCH \
  $KERNEL-debuginfo-$KERN_REV.$KERN_ARCH \
  kernel-debuginfo-common-$KERN_REV.$KERN_ARCH"
NEEDED=`rpm --qf "%{name}-%{version}-%{release}.%{arch}\n" \
    -q $CANDIDATES | grep "is not installed" | awk '{print $2}'`
if [ "$NEEDED" != "" ]; then
    echo -e "Need to install the following packages:\n$NEEDED"
    if [ `id -u` = "0" ]; then #attempt download and install
        DIR=`mktemp -d` || exit 1
        yumdownloader --enablerepo="*debuginfo*" $NEEDED --destdir=$DIR
        check_error $? "problem downloading rpm(s) $NEEDED"
        rpm --force -ivh $DIR/*.rpm
        check_error $? "problem installing rpm(s) $NEEDED"
        rm -r $DIR #cleanup
    fi
fi

If you do not have yum and yum-utils installed (and you are unable to install them), you will have to manually download and install the required kernel information packages. To generate the URL from which to download the required packages, use the following script:

rheldebugurl.sh

#! /bin/bash
pkg="redhat-release"
releasever=`rpm -q --qf "%{version}" $pkg`
base=`uname -m`
echo "ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/\
enterprise/$releasever/en/os/$base/Debuginfo"

Once you have manually downloaded the required packages to the machine, install the RPMs by running rpm --force -ivh package_names.

If you are currently using the kernel you wish to probe with SystemTap, you can immediately test whether the deployment was successful. If not, you will need to reboot and load the appropriate kernel.

To start the test, run the command stap -v -e 'probe vfs.read {printf("read performed\n"); exit()}'. This command simply instructs SystemTap to print read performed then exit properly once a virtual file system read is detected. If the SystemTap deployment was successful, you should get output similar to the following:

Pass 1: parsed user script and 45 library script(s) in 340usr/0sys/358real ms.
Pass 2: analyzed script: 1 probe(s), 1 function(s), 0 embed(s), 0 global(s) in 290usr/260sys/568real ms.
Pass 3: translated to C into "/tmp/stapiArgLX/stap_e5886fa50499994e6a87aacdc43cd392_399.c" in 490usr/430sys/938real ms.
Pass 4: compiled C into "stap_e5886fa50499994e6a87aacdc43cd392_399.ko" in 3310usr/430sys/3714real ms.
Pass 5: starting run.
read performed
Pass 5: run completed in 10usr/40sys/73real ms.

The last three lines of the output (i.e. beginning with Pass 5 indicate that SystemTap was able to successfully create the instrumentation to probe the kernel, run the instrumentation, detect the event being probed (in this case, a virtual file system read), and execute a valid handler (print text then close it with no errors).