Future Fedora Kernels and atop

[Albert Graham]

Hi Rahul,

I've contacted Gerlof and he has kindly responded (copied mail below).

At this point I should take myself out of the loop, except to say, as an Admin of many RHEL systems, I'm constantly switching between monitoring/status utilities e.g. iostat, mpstat, top, ps, sar, to get snapshots of what's going on, and in particular it's "per process" counters that are really useful. whether Atop is the right tool or not is not for me to say, except the principle behind is a good idea.


Albert.

================



Hi Albert,

I get a lot of questions about why the ATOP kernel patches are not
incorporated in the main stream kernel.... I know that some people have
asked questions about this on the LKML without getting clear answers as
far as I know.
To be honoust, I never tried to submit the patches myself to the main
stream kernel because I do not know whom to address.
Obviously getting these patches in the main stream kernel is what I
would prefer as well.

I saw the discussion you had with the people at Fedora/RedHat. They are
worried about the second line in the /proc/pid/stat file which is not
compatible. The reason I introduced my counters as a second line is the 
following:

  If the atop counters were added at the end of the first line and they
  would add a new *standard* counter on the first line, all atop counters
  would shift one position on that first line after the ATOP patch is made.
  In that case atop would show the wrong counters. By just reading the second
  line, atop is independent of the standard modifications on the first line
  (and other tools like ps and top using these counters do not mind about
  the second line).

Obviously if the ATOP counters would be added to the main stream kernel,
they can get their fixed position in the first line or the can even be
moved to the /proc/pid/io 'file'.  I will be happy to modify the atop
command for that....

Regards, Gerlof
-- Op 20-03-2008, 21:07 schreef Albert Graham:

> > Hi Gerlof,
> > 
> > I've asked the guys at Fedora/Redhat about including your patches in 
> > their kernels as well as shipping atop, I think they would not mind 
> > doing it if you had plans to submit your changes to the upstream kernel 
> > sometime soon (so they basically don't have to maintain the patches for 
> > too long).
> > 
> > Is this in your plans ?
> > 
> > Albert.
> > 
> > PS. - atop rocks.
>   

Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> Albert Graham wrote:
>> Rahul Sundaram wrote:
>>> Albert Graham wrote:
>>>> Hi Guys,
>>>>
>>>> Any chance of "atop" with kernel counter patches being added to 
>>>> fedora in the future ?
>>>>
>>>> This is a nice "advancement" which I'm sure will interest many 
>>>> fedora as well as RHEL users.
>>>>
>>>> Ref: http://www.atcomputing.nl/Tools/atop/home.html
>>>>
>>>> The advantages look very interesting:
>>>>
>>>> http://www.atcomputing.nl/Tools/atop/whyatop.html
>>>
>>> Has this been submitted upstream? Any plans to? Fedora prefers 
>>> staying close to upstream.
>>>
>>> Rahul
>>>
>> The site does not indicate that it has, but reading the page on 
>> patches seems to indicate counters are visible via |/proc//pid//stat 
>> as second line counters, so I would assume this would worry upstream 
>> guys on compatibility issues/arguments. Either way, I still think 
>> this would be a great tool, it works without the patchs but you don't 
>> get per process stats - which is what most people would be interested 
>> in particularly in RHEL.
>
> You might want to first talk to them about their plans regarding 
> upstream submission. Carrying patches forever and forwarding porting 
> them to each new kernel release is not a long term sustainable solution.
>
> Rahul
>