pixie-io
Warn users that kernel headers are missing during the Pixie install process
While Pixie has invested in its prepackaged linux headers and working without upstream headers, it is highly recommended to install the given distro's kernel header package. Upstream distros patch and backport many changes, which make the prepackaged option susceptible issues that are hard to anticipate and work around. Examples of these inconsistencies can be seen in #1863, #252 and the recent openSUSE (#2037) and Amazon Linux 2023 (https://github.com/pixie-io/pixie/issues/1986) issues.
Some of these issues get reported, but my suspicion is that this poor experience causes people to fail to fully evaluate Pixie since their initial impression shows that the socket tracer isn't functional (the most common way this problem manifests). For example, the openSUSE case mentioned above was only determined through my outreach and was in a position where the end user had moved on from evaluating Pixie.
If Pixie had the ability to detect when kernel headers aren't installed, we could warn the user that it is recommended to do so and link to common problems caused by the lack of headers. This will provide the end user with quick feedback on an area that's currently arcane to debug and hopefully prevent people from having a poor experience in these cases.
https://github.com/pixie-io/pixie/issues/1986 is another great case of the need for this warning/tooling. That was a bug that lasted from August until now and was due to the fact that Amazon linux headers needed to be installed since pixie's pre-packaged headers resulted in broken Go TLS tracing.
Users running Vizier v0.14.14 and Cloud v0.1.9 will now see these kernel warning checks when using the px cli to deploy. This warning is also included in px collect-logs since that is a prerequisite to opening a GitHub issue.
We need to add this warning check to Helm installs, but I'll probably be revisiting that at a later time.