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Solaris DTrace To Be Ported to FreeBSD
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."
The article doesn't say whether the program will be released under the BSD license (unlikely) or whether it will remain under the CDDL. The latter seems most likely.
I'm not sure how this benefits Sun, but something as awesome as this, I'm willing to assume it's altruism, and I appreciate it.
Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm
I have seen the use of this tool, and seriously, it rocks. There is no other tracing tool to compare with this. So, I am very eager to hear any news about this being ported to Linux, as not many people use FreeBSD ;-)
"In questions of science the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual."
It looks like a really useful tool. I wonder what the performance penalty is when the tool is turned off.
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?
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
This has been working on Linux sometime in 2004
The official reason is that it wasn't release was because Linus didn't want the BSD folks using it, but the real reason is the Department of Homeland security didn't want the BSD folk to find the last bug in their release.
Thats what I just head right now. (Thanks, voices)
I've seen it before, fairly often. Perhaps a bit of an exaggeration, but still - commonly used.
Google shows 229,000 hits for "insanely great" (as a phrase).
Welcome to, umm, Geek English!
When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Rel
For we that don't have a clue what DTrace is, here's what the has to say: DTrace allows to do performance tuning with applications and troubleshoot production systems--all with little or no performance impact. DTrace provides improved visibility into kernel and application activity, giving the user operational insights with which they can make performance gains..
The no performance penalty sounds really cool to me.
--
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Picaday! Soon to be open "Picture of the day web".
Hosting 20G hd, 1Tb bw! ssh $7.95
"insanely great" is well known. In fact, it's in the Jargon File
Igor Presnyakov stole my hat
Wow. I didn't think anyone would even put that much effort into a troll. I mean it shows quite a lot of ignorance and stupidity to be sure, but under the guise of being almost intelligent.
Must be sad, living your life. Be content in knowing you'll be dead someday.
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.
the best damn piece on slashdot and some moron marked it flamebait. I've modded it up as much as I can (a big +1 whoo!)
And then proceeded to cancel that moderation by posting in the story.
Let me guess, you must be new here?
my +1 was already cancelled by someone else modding it as flamebait, so it didn't matter.
;)
which is why I posted...
sigh...
weird tho, the score is the same as before I posted.
so someone else modded it up +1 to cancel the cancel on my +1 ? erg, you're making my brain hurt!
bad slashdot user, bad!
Gah.... I've just found you can also read this tripe on several other sites. I had to look, I was curious........
Maybe he thought it was a typo for "insanely grate".
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
You know, I've read a lot of software reviews, but I don't think I've ever seen the "insanely" used as an adverb before...
They're called context clues smart guy. I learned about them in like second grade. Although IANAGE (I Am Not A Grammar Expert) I could have figured out what "insanely great" means in the second grade.
Mac community, from Steve Jobs; also BSD Unix people via Bill Joy. Something so incredibly elegant that it is imaginable only to someone possessing the most puissant of hacker-natures.
So, it's a derogatory term?
Seriously, neither Bill Joy, and least of all Steve Jobs, strike me as being able to have an informed opinion on elegant software implementations. Jobs has good design taste, but that's different.
I don't care what ESR or his Aunt Tillie think.
That said, I have no objection to the word "insanely".
start sarcasm
But it is not BSD! It can't be better than anything BSD has created.
We all know that Solaris is just a crappy system that has no use in the enterprise.
end sarcasm
HGTTG: "I knew that there was something fundementally wrong with the Universe."
OMFG!!! IT'S ALIVE !!!!!!
Linux can be build with "bsd-style process accounting" and as such, can this be made to work in Linux?
It seems like everywhere I look I've heard comments about how great DTrace is, so to see it ported to FreeBSD really makes me happy. I do have a couple of questions about it though, simply going in line with the announcements over the last couple days.
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.
"You look so different now, but looks can be deceiving." -- Snuff
What with ZFS and Linux partitions being put off at least until 2006 it might be the *only* feature of Solaris 10 for now. Not to be confused with the "pains" that were added, like insipid way java management console plugins are added/admined, new hiding places for common admin/config files or how general installation is just a pain in the keister. Save yourself some trouble, GNU/Linux passed up Solaris about 2 years ago.
As the guy porting DTrace, I want to clear up a few questions that appear frequently in the comments here. First, though, please be kind to the blog -- it's hosted on our (OffMyServer's) network, which is on a T1. I dunno how bad it got when the story was posted, but just for reference, it'd be nice to not have our network connection die.
:)
FAQ #1 seems to be about the license. Obviously, the CDDL is `viral' in the sense that changes in the code need to be provided under the same terms of the CDDL. In my understanding, this applies only to files in which modifications take place. Extension of something CDDL by adding extra files seems to not require those files to be released under the CDDL. That said, this is a porting effort, and most of the changes I will make will be inside CDDL-licensed files. Thus, anything imported will be under the CDDL. This does not require anything external files to be under the CDDL and thus it can be shipped with FreeBSD without `infecting' other files.
FAQ #2 seems to be whether Sun is happy about this or not. If you have read the article, you would have seen that I've been encouraged to work on this by Sun kernel engineers. Whether Sun as a whole is happy about this is not known to me, but everybody involved in getting it this far has been, so I'm not terribly worried about the rest.
FAQ #3 is about performance incurrences. Certain aspects of DTrace incur performance penalties, but only when DTrace is running. DTrace by itself is a library and a userland tool. All instrumentation is done dynamically and when DTrace is not instrumenting something, no performance hits happen whatsoever. When it is running, we have several advantages to other tools because (unlike e.g. truss) we are instrumenting single processes. Processes which are not being instrumented will not take any performance hits other than the fact that they have a bit less CPU usage since DTrace is instrumenting something.
How do you not take a performance penalty when the profiler is off? You must be root to run DTrace. When you instrument functions inside an application, this is done on-the-fly by rewriting the code that is being executed. When it is not being executed, nothing is being rewritten and it's not even looking to rewrite something. It's just some code resident in memory (in fact, modules are even loaded as needed). It sounds like it might be prone to security flaws, but keep in mind that this has been working in production for a while now.
When will this be in Linux? I don't know. I won't be working on it. I challenge _you_ to do this
Is this vaporware? No. I'm continuing development from about a week off (since I lost my development machine) this evening.
Feel free to ask more questions, I'll try to address them as I see them. But please refrain from bad-mouthing Sun or myself out of spite, jealousy, or whatever. I know it's fun to troll (if you're a troll), but the rest of us really don't appreciate it.
--Devon
www.sitetronics.com/wordpress
the best damn piece on slashdot
yeah, an anti-freebsd rant posted to an article about freebsd, how fucking original. let me guess, netcraft confirms BSD is dying, right?
some moron marked it flamebait.
the only moron i see here is you. you bitch about about flamebait being modded as such. no one cares how you used your mod points. get a fucking life.
Brilliant? This guy has been posting the same damn thing lifted from a FreeBSD mailing list in every FreeBSD-related article for months.
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.
I'm looking for someone clueful to port DTrace to DragonFlyBSD instead. FreeBSD has too many projects where they announce they're going to do something and then never finish. Just look at any of their past status reports. They read like tombstones for unfinished projects. Or consider FreeBSD 5-SMP --- another unfinished project they're sweeping under the rug. At least in DragonFlyBSD, they do what they say they're going to do. More in fact. They do it first then say they've done it.
...for the slashbots to tell us why this is evil - everything Sun does is evil, after all.
How does it work? That's some seriously obfuscated code!
Zonk,
Why do you think all of your worthless posts are worth of the front page?
Why don't you start posting every new release on Freshmeat to the front page as a full article?
Also, you don't ever check your E-Mail do you. Probably at quota with flames.
... facts are facts. ;)
FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."
NetBSD:
NetBSD, for When Portability and Stability Matter (Oct 2004)
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (Sep 2004)
OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)
OpenSSH (OpenBSD subproject) has become a de facto Internet standard.
*BSD in general:
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
BSD Success Stories (O'Reilly, 2004) (pdf) ~ from Onlamp BSD DevCenter
"The BSDs - FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Darwin, and others - have earned a reputation for stability, security, performance, and ease of administration."
--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.
Same old GNU/Linux FUD, that has been disproved countless times..
:)
In short: the MIT research is *11 years old*, and that Rice study on the TCP/IP stack uses FreeBSD *2.2.6*.
(And btw, Eric Raymond advocates BSD license over GPL.)