I recently saw an example of topas running in a colleague’s putty session, and wondered whether a similar advanced utility existed for Linux. While top is good for the quick and dirty view into Linux goings on, there surely must be a utility that gives a more detailed view into Linux resource usage, like topas does for AIX. So I did some looking around and found atop. In order to get the full benefit of additional per-process statistics from atop, kernel patches are needed that provide the necessary counters. I thought this was a good opportunity to do two things then. Patch a Redhat Enterprise kernel to get full benefit of atop and then recompile the newly patched source into an installable kernel RPM. This will also yield a kernel-devel RPM that we will need in order to recompile VMWare guest modules, I need this because this devel environment is a RHEL5.2 VMWare server 2 guest.

Let’s get to it then.
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