Since HN has recently got into the habit of correcting misleading titles, perhaps PG could correct this to 'using SystemTap on Ubuntu'?<p>Systemtap is made, principally, by Red Hat. On RHEL and similar, running a tap consists of running the following command:<p><pre><code> stap tapset.stp
</code></pre>
This is fairly well known and easily discoverable.<p>Ubuntu doesn't even include SystemTap in it's default kernel. Saying that his experiences running SystemTap on Ubuntu are what 'using SystemTap' is like is very misleading.
You don't need SystemTap to determine which process is using I/O. Just use pidstat from the venerable sysstat package that comes with all Linuxes (<a href="http://sebastien.godard.pagesperso-orange.fr/man_pidstat.html" rel="nofollow">http://sebastien.godard.pagesperso-orange.fr/man_pidstat.htm...</a>). Requires Linux 2.6.20 or later to report I/O usage. You can also just look in /proc, which has had I/O counters a few years now.