Hi, there! This is the report of the Document Freedom Day event that took place in Campinas, São Paulo state, Brazil. I will talk a little bit about how we (keep reading to know who “we” are!) organized it, and the conclusions that can be drawn to help for the next edition.

Organization

The DFD (or Document Freedom Day) 2013 in Campinas was organized by the LibrePlanet São Paulo (link in pt_BR) group. If you follow this blog, and if you speak portuguese, then you have probably read the announcement of the group that I made last year. If you haven’t: LibrePlanet São Paulo is part of the LibrePlanet project (sponsored by the Free Software Foundation), and "… is a global network of free software activists and teams working together to help further the ideals of software freedom by advocating and contributing to free software.".

This will probably be one of those controversial posts, but I really cannot just be silent about a behaviour that I am constantly seeing around me.

Since my childhood, I am fascinated by the power of the words. I always liked reading a lot, and despite not knowing the grammar rules (either in pt_BR or en_US, the former being my native language, the latter being the only idiom I can consider myself fluent in), I am deeply interested in what words (and their infinite meanings) can do to us. (If you can read in portuguese, and if you also like to study or admire in this subject, I strongly recommend a romance by José Saramago called “O Homem Duplicado”). So now, what I am seeing everywhere is that people are being as careless as ever with words, their meanings, and specially their implications.

Olá a todos!

Finalmente consegui um pouco de tempo na minha agenda, e resolvi escrever no blog para anunciar a criação do grupo LibrePlanet São Paulo!

O que é o LibrePlanet

O projeto LibrePlanet teve início em 2006, durante a reunião de membros da FSF (a Free Software Foundation). Ele foi criado para ajudar a organizar maneiras de levar o movimento de Software Livre ao conhecimento da população em geral.

Os grupos são organizados geograficamente, e cada um é responsável por definir metas e estratégias visando fomentar o Software Livre na região. É importante deixar claro: o objetivo é trabalhar em prol do Software Livre, e não do open source. Para saber mais a respeito da definição de Software Livre, recomendo que leia este artigo.

Hi everybody :-).

I finally got some time to finish this series of posts, and I hope you like the overall result. For those of you who are reading this blog for the first time, you can access the first post here, and the second here.

My goal with this third post is to talk a little bit about how you can use the SDT probes with tracepoints inside GDB. Maybe this particular feature will not be so helpful to you, but I recommend reading the post either way. I will also give a brief explanation about how the SDT probes are laid out inside the binary. So, let’s start!

I tell you this: it is depressing when you realize that you spent more time struggling with blog engines than writing posts on your blog!

It’s been a long time since I wrote the first post about this subject, and since then the patches have been accepted upstream, and GDB 7.5 now has official support for userspace SystemTap probes :-). Yay!

Well, but enough of cheap talk, let’s get to the business!

After a long time, here we are again :-).

With this post I will start to talk about the integration between GDB and SystemTap. This is something that Tom Tromey and I did during the last year. The patch is being reviewed as I write this post, and I expect to see it checked-in in the next few days/weeks. But let’s get our hands dirty…

SystemTap Userspace Probes

You probably use (or have at least heard of) SystemTap, and maybe you think the tool is only useful for kernel inspections. If that’s your case, I have a good news: you’re wrong! You can actually use SystemTap to inspect userspace applications too, by using what we call SDT probes, or Static Defined Tracing probes. This is a very cheap and easy way to include probes in your application, and you can even specify arguments to those probes.

This post is actually a “reply” to Gary Benson’s Working on gdb post.

I have been working with GDB for quite some time now, and even though the project officially uses CVS (yes, you read it correctly, it is CVS indeed!) as its version control system, fortunately we also have a git mirror. In the end, what happens is that almost every developer uses the git mirror and just goes to CVS to commit something. But this is another discussion. Aside of this git mirror, we also have the Archer repository (which uses git by default).