(In reply to Jeff Mahoney from comment #4) > It's needed for pretty much anything that needs a symbol table (and also the > -debuginfo package). for perf, /proc/kallsyms is generally used (subject to kptr_restrict. debuginfo vmlinux is used for annotation i'd need to look closer at what exactly systemtap can do, without vmlinux, without the debug version the answer is usually very little (some trace point stuff). I think it's best to move slowly here.