Perun supports multiple collectors of performance metrics.
Our most advanced collector is Tracer (runnable by perun collect trace),
which has additional dependencies.
The standard Perun installation does not automatically install the instrumentation frameworks used by Tracer: SystemTap and eBPF. Installing these frameworks is optional when using Perun, although having at least one of them is required in order to run Tracer. Moreover, both frameworks rely on system-wide packages and thus should be installed directly by the user when needed.
In Ubuntu, SystemTap can be installed using apt-get package manager:
sudo apt-get install systemtap
Furthermore, kernel debug symbols package must be installed in order to use SystemTap. For Ubuntu 16.04 and higher run the following:
sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys C8CAB6595FDFF622
codename=$(lsb_release -c | awk '{print $2}')
sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ddebs.list << EOF
deb http://ddebs.ubuntu.com/ ${codename} main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://ddebs.ubuntu.com/ ${codename}-security main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://ddebs.ubuntu.com/ ${codename}-updates main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://ddebs.ubuntu.com/ ${codename}-proposed main restricted universe multiverse
EOF
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install linux-image-$(uname -r)-dbgsym
To test that SystemTap works correctly, you can run the following command:
stap -v -e 'probe vfs.read {printf("read performed\n"); exit()}'
For more information, see the source.
In Fedora, SystemTap can be installed using yum package manager:
sudo yum install systemtap systemtap-runtime
Similarly to the Ubuntu, additional kernel packages must be installed to run SystemTap properly:
kernel-debuginfo
kernel-debuginfo-common
kernel-devel
Different Fedora versions use different methods for obtaining those packages. Please refer to the SystemTap setup guide
Tracer uses the BCC (BPF Compiler Collection) frontend for the eBPF engine; eBPF is a framework that allows us to instrument the profile programs. We recommend to install the necessary packages from the IO Visor repository as follows:
sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 4052245BD4284CDD
echo "deb https://repo.iovisor.org/apt/$(lsb_release -cs) $(lsb_release -cs) main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/iovisor.list
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install bcc-tools libbcc-examples linux-headers-$(uname -r)
The default BCC installation uses bindings for Python 2, however, Perun requires bindings for Python 3. To install them, run the following command:
sudo apt-get install python3-bcc
Installing BCC on Fedora is much easier. Simply run:
sudo dnf install bcc python3-bcc
Note that when using Perun in a Python virtual environment, the above installation instructions
are not enough. Since the Python bcc package is not available through pip, installing it
directly in a virtualenv using pip requirements list is not an option. A common workaround is
to copy the system-wide python bcc package installed in the previous step (python3-bcc)
into the virtualenv packages.
To find the system python3 bcc package, run:
python3 -c "import site; print(site.getsitepackages())"
which shows the global site-packages paths (be warned that not all paths must necessarily exist).
The package bcc should be located in at least one the listed path (otherwise the installation of
python3-bcc must have failed in the previous step). The resulting path may look like e.g.:
/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages
Now activate the virtual environment and run the same command to get the list of site-packages paths local to the virtualenv and find one which does exists:
<prefix>/venv-3.8/lib/python3.8/site-packages
Next, copy the bcc package from the global site-packages to the virtualenv local site-packages:
cp -r /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/bcc <prefix>/venv-3.8/lib/python3.8/site-packages/
Now the bcc package should be available in the virtualenv python.
You can test it with the following command with activated virtualenv:
python3 -c "import bcc"
which should successfully finish (i.e. ModuleNotFoundError should not be raised).