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

License?

[rpbailey1642]

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.

When will it be available in Linux ?

[UltimaGuy]

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 ;-)

Re:When will it be available in Linux ?

[brilinux]

Um, actually, quite a few people (myself included) use it on servers (and I use it on my laptop as well), and most of us are quite happy about this, and get quite upset when people blow us off as if the only real F/OS OS to use is GNU/Linux. You might actually like a BSD if you try it...

Re:When will it be available in Linux ?

[diegocgteleline.es]

Linux does have a "comparable" feature (soon to be merged in mainline) called "kprobes", or "systemtap" (systemtap uses kprobes)

You can see a fairly detailed analisis in the 2005 Proceedings, Volume 2, page 57 of the linux symposium

Also some doc from IBM: http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/librar y/l-kprobes.html

also there's a "linux trace toolkit". A post about LTT vs dtrace...whatever, too much flamewar for my taste.

Re:When will it be available in Linux ?

[Short Circuit]

I've been spoiled by GNU extensions to tools like grep and ls. Considering I spend most of my time in a command line (under a GNOME terminal, no less), I'd probably find myself frequently irritated.

That said, I have downloaded the FreesBIE LiveCD; I just haven't burned it yet.

Tons of links in the article

[ReformedExCon]

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?

FreeBSD really needs this

[Anonymous Coward]

FreeBSD performance has generally been declining with each subsequent release in recent years. No one seems to be able to get to the bottom of the problem. It could be the effects of FreeBSD suffering from "creeping featuritis" combined with a bit of bloat.

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:FreeBSD really needs this

[dodell]

While this has been moderated as -1, Troll, it is somewhat true. There have been various performance regressions, which are to be seen in performance tests benchmarking I/O between FreeBSD 4.x and 5.x. Some of the problems are difficult to find and analyze. I'm sorry that this was moderated as a troll, since it is partially a valid point. And DTrace is a great tool to help figure out precisely what is going on.

this is great

[mendicant_zero_x]

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.

Re:Clear up a few things

[Anonymous Coward]

>When will this be in Linux? I don't know. I won't >be working on it. I challenge _you_ to do this :)

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!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Good for Ruby!

[laffer1]

Well the kernel's are different as someone else pointed out, but there is a powerpc port of FreeBSD in the works. That means you can dual boot your Mac with FreeBSD and OS X. It would be easier than switching to Sun since you don't have to buy new hardware.

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!

[evilviper]

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

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.