Four Useful DTrace Scripts You Can Port to SystemTap

A persistent myth among system administrators is that there is no DTrace equivalent for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. While this was true a few years ago, today, SystemTap can accomplish the same tasks as DTrace. This paper describes in detail how to accomplish the same tasks with SystemTap that some of the most popular DTrace scripts perform. The authors found four DTrace scripts that are useful in several situations and adapted some existing SystemTap scripts to achieve similar results. By using SystemTap to react to common scenarios that system administrators and developers face, this paper shows how powerful SystemTap can be.