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."

Comments

Good for Ruby!

[fishdan]

OOOH! Someone please tell me that the OSX port is close behind. I'd been living on a mac for quite a while, but after seeing the how dtrace can help with Ruby dev I'd switched to Solaris for my Ruby optimization (which is up to about 30% of my work now). If I can start doing this on my powerbook, I'll be a super happy camper.

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.

Re:Good for Ruby!

[jm91509]

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.

Thats easy. You used to be a Mac only person (making some guesses here...) but now you are a Solaris user.

How many other people are trying solaris for the first time because of this feature?

Suck in the developers and they may turn into server sales or even just positive PR.

Sounds like more than altruisim to me.

Re:License?

[jonadab]

Why would this occasion a license change? It's a *port*, as in, the code will now run on more systems than it used to. Licensing doesn't have anything to do with that; it's still fundamentally the same codebase, so I'm sure the code will still be covered by the same licensing terms it already was released under.

To create a BSD-licensed version, someone would have to *clone* it, which is different from porting.

Re:When will it be available in Linux ?

[tsalaroth]

I'd be willing to bet there's a shitload of FreeBSD web servers out there, since I manage twelve of them, myself.

Linux has its uses and is great for many tasks, but only Gentoo comes close to the ports system and how well it manages software installation.

Either way, I'm hoping that yes, it will be ported to Linux as well, if it hasn't been already.

Re:License?

[Z4rd0Z]

My guess is that any kernel changes will go into the FreeBSD base under the BSD license, and the DTrace tool itself will keep its current license and will be installed from the ports collection.

Also, I don't think FreeBSD is committed to removing all non-BSD code.

Re:License?

[dodell]

I think that what will end up happening is this:

Modifications I need to make to already BSD licensed code will remain BSD licensed. New pieces of code I write to get it working that are not taken from Sun will be BSD licensed. Everything else will be porting work and will be CDDL.