Solaris DTrace To Be Ported to FreeBSD 151
daria42 writes "It looks like Sun's famous Dynamic Tracing tool - one of the best features in Solaris 10 - is getting ported to FreeBSD. Sun open-sourced the code back in January and it has been picked up by FreeBSD developer Devon O'Dell. The tool provides insanely great advanced performance analysis and debugging features for server software. Good to see some result come out of the Sun open-sourcing process." From the article: "O'Dell told ZDNet Australia the aim of the project -- which commenced a month ago -- was that all scripts and applications that utilised DTrace under its native Solaris environment should be able to run in FreeBSD with no changes. While FreeBSD's existing ktrace function was similar to DTrace, it was limited in scope, according to O'Dell. 'FreeBSD implements a somewhat similar facility for dynamically instrumenting syscalls for any given application,' he said."
License? (Score:3, Interesting)
When will it be available in Linux ? (Score:2, Interesting)
Tons of links in the article (Score:5, Interesting)
Do you need to instrument the calls you expect to profile? If so, how can you avoid taking that performance hit when deciding whether to perform the profiling or not, even when the profiler is off? It's still got to check the profiler level each time, doesn't it?
Re:When will it be available in Linux ? (Score:5, Interesting)
FreeBSD really needs this (Score:5, Interesting)
A tool like this could really aid in finding all the bottlenecks. Benchmarks have become an embarrassment for FreeBSD as of late, and it is really sad to see that FreeBSD has fallen so far behind. Hopefully this could start to turn things around.
Re:When will it be available in Linux ? (Score:4, Interesting)
You can see a fairly detailed analisis in the 2005 Proceedings, Volume 2, page 57 [linuxsymposium.org] of the linux symposium
Also some doc from IBM: http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/libra
also there's a "linux trace toolkit". A post about LTT vs dtrace [theaimsgroup.com]...whatever, too much flamewar for my taste.
Re:When will it be available in Linux ? (Score:3, Interesting)
That said, I have downloaded the FreesBIE LiveCD; I just haven't burned it yet.
this is great (Score:2, Interesting)
1) Considering the fact that we are currently going through the Beta's for FreeBSD 6, I am curious how, if at all, a fully implemented DTrace would help the devs with tracking down and solving the current beta problems. From my current understanding, it seems that it could be a great help with tracking down and solving the current show-stoppers. Can someone clarify this for me?
2) I have also read an article somewhere where a DTrace dev showed how easy it was to track down a memory leak in a small program. With Gnome currently going on a memory reduction kick, would a fully featured DTrace be able to help with finding these memory problems? I realize that comparing Gnome with a small application is ridiculous so I can't expect it to magically find these problems in just a few minutes, but could it help? Also, if DTrace helped to find these problems on versions ported to FreeBSD, would they easily be ported back into the main linux-based version of Gnome?
Any feedback would be appreciated because from what (admittedly little) I've read, it seems that DTrace could help on these fronts, but I'm really not 100% sure that it would.
Re:FreeBSD really needs this (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Clear up a few things (Score:1, Interesting)
Good challange! But isnt the big problem here the license issue? Someone can do something like dtrace but a port is hard...
Re:MOD PARENT UP! (Score:1, Interesting)
And what does it mean that a former FreeBSD core member admits that FreeBSD is dying? Well, in my opinion FreeBSD's leadership has been a little out of touch lately. That doesn't mean that OpenBSD, NetBSD, and now DragonFly (for the disaffected FreeBSD people) can't continue kicking ass.
Re:Good for Ruby! (Score:2, Interesting)
I should point out that the PowerPC port is not tier 1 yet so its not perfect. I know there have been a few problems with X11 and keyboards on laptops that use ADB protocol are broken (all ibooks for example) I think some powerbook models use USB so you might be ok there.
There is a freebsd-ppc mailing list. If you look at the archives you can learn more about it. They just released an iso of 6.0 beta 3 or 4 for it.
Re:Good for Ruby! (Score:3, Interesting)
No, I think he's talking about Sun making dtrace open source, which might turn him into a FreeBSD user, or perhaps allow him to use OS X exclusively (not likely with the kernel changes needed, but maybe Apple will see the light.)
So, sacrificing your value-added product to the public domain seems to be entirely altruistic AFAICT. With something like NFS, they stood to gain directly by allowing others to use it, but that doesn't appear to be the case with dtrace.
Perhaps it's not altruism. Perhaps it's an attempt to improve all Unix systems, to get people to switch away from Windows. That would be very benefitial to Sun.