Sun Opens OpenSolaris.Org

An anonymous reader writes "Sun has launched the first version of opensolaris.org, featuring a small initial drop of source code. The idea is to make a display of good faith to the Solaris community while the rest of the source code due diligence is completed. The source code for Dynamic Tracing (DTrace) is available for download under the terms of the newly OSI-approved CDDL license."

Comments

Re:Dynamic Tracing

[nbert]

From the link provided in the article:

DTrace provides a powerful infrastructure to permit administrators, developers, and service personnel to concisely answer arbitrary questions about the behavior of the operating system and user programs.

So the answer to your question is: no, it's not useful for a "normal" user.

Re:Dynamic Tracing

[illumin8]

The best place to go for this information is the well documented Dtrace FAQs.

From it, I shamelessly lifted the following brief synopsis:

Q. What is DTrace?

A. DTrace is a new facility in the Solaris Operating System that adds dynamic instrumentation and tracing to the kernel and can be used on production systems. It's a power tool that can be used by both the entry-level and experienced system administrators to diagnose and resolve problems in hours or minutes that might have previously taken days.

Q. What are the benefits of DTrace?

A. Faster resolution of performance problems for system administrators
Quicker time to market and higher quality product for developers
Greater utilization of existing system resources for IT managers

Q. What are the key highlights of DTrace?

A. Comprehensive coverage: over 30,000 instrumentation points in even the smallest system; integrated access to both application and kernel data
Always available: built-in with no need to reboot or otherwise reconfigure system, disable or alter applications, or disable user/client access
Safe: cannot panic system and has no impact on the system when not being used
Enable only the trace points you need
Analyzes data in real time on production systems
Extensible as new analysis routines can be built for re-use using the D programming language

Q. What is the performance overhead of DTrace?

A. When not in use, DTrace has no impact on system performance or other behavior. When being used, DTrace overhead is dependent on the number of probe points being observed.

Q. How does Sun's DTrace compare with competitive offerings?

A. DTrace is the only dynamic tracing tool available that eliminates the need for collecting and processing event data. With DTrace a system administrator can query the system experiencing the problem in real time, while in production, and get accurate and precise information regarding the source of the problem. No log files are generated, and there is no data to analyze. This reduces the time it takes to identify and resolve problems by orders of magnitude! Literally from days to minutes.

Containers are based on software. They offer logical separation with the same OS in each Container. Containers offer enormous scalabilty: while there is no hard coded limit, upto 4000 per OS image are available and is beyond normal requirements today.

Q. Can DTrace be used without knowing the D language?

A. You can leverage scripts developed by others (such as those available on the Sun BigAdmin portal). However, it is not difficult to learn D which is very similar to the ANSI C programming language with a special set of functions and variables to make tracing easy.

Re:Thank you to the folks at Sun...

[Wesley Felter]

The real question is whether Sun's license is compatible with the GPL.

That's not a question; it is not compatible.

Re:webpage running on linux?

[dme]

Check the machine itself. It says:

Server: Sun-ONE-Web-Server/6.1

Blogs on souce code and DTrace

[ChrisRijk]

Bryan Cantrill, one of the DTrace developers wrote this blog entry as a general introduction to the source code layout and also to DTrace. This post by Adam Leventhal goes into some more detail.

82678 lines of C were made public. No registration, no click through license before download. The OpenSolaris FAQ is pretty good btw, and there's also a roadmap page.

According to this blog (the entry dated 15:43), those in the pilot program (more than 100 developers out side of Sun) have today gotten access to the entire Solaris source base, and have already built their own version - screen shot.

Re:Sun Compiler and Tools

[Darren.Moffat]

You can (and infact Sun does) compile Solaris with gcc. Our production AMD64 kernel and a large number of the AMD64 libraries are compiled with gcc . However the makefile assume the Sun C compiler but the build environment has a wrapper around gcc to make it look like the Sun compiler.