Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Solaris DTrace To Be Ported to FreeBSD

Posted by Zonk on from the new-toys dept.

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."

7 of 151 comments (clear)

  1. License? by rpbailey1642 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  2. Tons of links in the article by ReformedExCon · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
  3. Re:When will it be available in Linux ? by brilinux · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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...

  4. FreeBSD really needs this by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting
    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.

    1. Re:FreeBSD really needs this by dodell · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

      --
      www.sitetronics.com/wordpress
  5. Re:When will it be available in Linux ? by diegocgteleline.es · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  6. Re:When will it be available in Linux ? by Short+Circuit · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    --
    tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)