experiences building Live CD with systemtap and kernel debuginfo

[William Cohen <wcohen at redhat dot com>]

I investigated building a liveCD to use in an OLS Linux
tutorial. There are some tools that allow the create of live CDs:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraLiveCD/LiveCDHowTo

I waited eons for the following command was able to create a CD iso
image that included systemtap and the kernel-debuginfo (slow because
downloaded from web):


livecd-creator \
--repo=crh,http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/development/i386/os/ 
\
--repo=crhdi,http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/development/i386/debug/ 
\
--repo=lcd6,http://people.redhat.com/davidz/livecd/i386/ \
--package=fedora-livecd-gnome \
--package=kernel-debuginfo \
--package=kernel-devel \
--package=systemtap \
--fslabel=rawhide-LiveCD-1-stap0

Once the image was built created a CD from the .iso file.

I rebooted the machine using the newly created CD and was able to get
a desktop. The liveCD had the firefox web browser so I download the
iotime.stp example to see I could get that to run. Unfortunately, the
version of systemtap (0.5.10-1.fc7) in rawhide doesn't compile the
code. I downloaded the updated systemtap versions from FC6
(0.5.12-1.fc6); It had a different set of failures during compiling
the module e.g. 'cycles_t' undeclared 'beg' undeclared, and
'stp_time_t' has no member named 'cpufreq'. Need a working version of
systemtap RPM in rawhide.

However, on the positive side, I was able to fit the kernel-debuginfo,
gcc, and systemtap on one CD. About 673MB was used on the CD. No effort
was made to squeeze thing onto the CD. Assuming a 700MB CD that means
there is another 25M or so for additional stuff. Systemtap examples
would need to be packaged as an RPM and a "--repo" and "--package"
option would be needed to pull in those examples.


-Will