systemtap probe at specific oracle function offset + BONUS

This is a trick i use to be able to put a systemtap probe at specific function offset in an oracle executable.That mean beside function entry and exit we can also probe at a specific offset such as “r0_aes_cbc_loop_dec_x86_intel+224”. Although this can be easily done using perf  (perf probe -oracle r0_aes_cbc_loop_dec_x86_intel+224)  or ftrace it seem not possible to do that using systemtap due to the lack of debuginfo .

This can be useful as a workaround for the error “registration error (rc 0)” described here or for other purpose !

Playing with oracle DB 18c on-premises before official release

Rodrigo Jorge has already explained a great way to install and play with Oracle 18c DB instance on-premises using Exadata binaries downloaded from edelivery. The basic idea is to install the oracle exadata binaries and before creating the database replace the library “libserver18.a” with the  version gotten from an oracle cloud instance  (Using Oracle Cloud trial account). And that’s it !

• Installing Oracle Database 18.0.0.0.0 binaries on Oracle Linux 7
• Creating and running an Oracle 18.0.0.0.0 DB instance on Oracle Linux

But for those like me that don’t have an international credit card required to create an Oracle Cloud trial account  (Yes i don’t have one 😦 ) or don’t want to create one  ! How to proceed to get a copy of this working libserver18.a library ? May be ask one of the oracle folks to upload it to somewhere and hope that there is no backdoor on it :p  or just try to hack it your self 😀