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Solaris' Dtrace in Detail
paulkoan writes "The Register has a further details about the new Dtrace systems utility bundled with Solaris 10, along with pictures of the authors, and user testimonials. It also highlights Suns vague assurances that this (if it lives up to the hype) amazing utility may or may not end up in the public domain."
They seem to have a lot of praise from users, not just market speak. And technical users yet.
I'd be very, VERY surprised if Sun allows Dtrace into the open source world, at least not for a while. If Dtrace really is the supertool it seems to be, and is actually and massively UNIQUE, it represents a reason peole will move to Solaris and buy Sun's hardware to do it. Maybe the closest thing to a Unix killer app that has existed for a while.
Now eventually (as in five years down the road) it will probably pay for Sun to open it up. If I were them, I'd milk it for all its worth on the "get people to move to Sun boxes" mantra, while the rest of the world trys (and probably fails) to duplicate the tool. Then, when Sun has gotten all the converts they are likely to, start making the tool even BETTER by opening it up and letting the world go to town on it. (GPL or something similar so Sun can incorporate back in the goodies.)
Of course, that's just an off the cuff theory by someone who doesn't know.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
I don't think Sun's open sourcing the thing will help Linux users much anyway, the kernel design is probably very different, with more evolved semantics. Which means Linux developers will hae to do the work themselves if they want their admins to have these facilites.
Note that this is finally a tool to resolve finger-pointing *it's your app that's slow - no it's the kernel etc* . I guess IBM will find it advantageous to create a similar Linux tool for their systems, as they bill Linux as an application serving environment. So we should see it soon on our own boxen.
The sad thing is this proves once again that closed source companies retain an edge at innovating.
This is not a signature.
The mechanism (dynamic instrumentation) is similar. What makes DTrace unique over and above k/dprobes is the incredible power of the 'D' script language. It features things such as speculations (look at the docs on sun.com) that are absolutely vital in many situations for diagnosing problems - too much data is often as bad as too little data, and DTrace lets you easily get exactly the data you want, and only the data you want.
You can find a small section comparing kprobes with DTrace in the DTrace USENIX paper; it also mentions some other differences (kprobes can easily crash your production system; that won't happen with DTrace).
actually that's not true. Kerninst does exactly that.
Kerninst is a framework for dynamically splicing code into a running kernel, almost anywhere, anytime. Code can be removed and changed at will. Kerninst works on standard (unmodified) Solaris and Linux kernels, *no* kernel re-compilation is necessary.