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DTrace Becomes Usable on FreeBSD
daria42 writes "A project to port Sun Microsystems' Dynamic Tracing (DTrace) tool to FreeBSD appears to have achieved some initial success. DTrace was open sourced last year and is one of the coolest features in Solaris 10."
All the code Apple borrowed from BSDs and changed is contributed back with DarWin OS. It is also the core set of components upon which Mac OS X was developed. In July 2003 Apple released Darwin under version 2.0 of the APSL license, which the Free Software Foundation (FSF) approved as a free software license. Previous releases had taken place under an earlier version of the APSL that did not meet the FSF's definition of free software, although it met the requirements of the Open Source Definition.
I dont think DTrace on FreeBSD is going to sway over and change the mind of those who use and pay and contribute to the GPL. From a strategy point of view it just made BSD's that much more competitive with Solaris and Sun offers. With the GPL you at least get some improvemnts back if your contribution is of value and nobody can close its acess.
Well, or GPL people could take the fine contribution of the BSD people, and port it to GPL. Therefore both communities can benefit. If Sun had released it under GPL, the BSD people would have been prevented from doing this. At least that is my understanding. So in this case the BSD licence seemed like a good choice, the one that maximises freedom for developers.
Furthermore, I believe Sun has stated that they would be happy if DTrace was ported to Linux, and though they can't pay developers to do it, they can provide other help (perhaps like the testsuites).
Again I'm baffled by the level of hostility towards Sun on Slashdot. Here they open source an amazing tool, and help us port it, and they get a lot of nasty comments for it.
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
I saw Bryan Cantrill give a demo of DTrace at my university. I was pretty impressed.
I wanted to use it for my application to diagnose performance and race condition problems. However, then I realized I'd have to wrap all the instrumentation so that it would still work portably. Then I thought it seemed like an awful lot of bother just to get some profiling in there, especially if I was going to support an alternate method of collecting the same events so as to make the whole application (which includes profiling support) portable.
"Sorry, we have to run it on Solaris or FreeBSD to debug/optimize" was ultimately what made me stay away from it. I looked into getting OpenSolaris working, and by the time I'd finally finally discovered from Sun's extremely confusing website and the equally confusing OpenSolaris webpages that what I wanted was Solaris Express:Community Release (SX:CR) so that I could get some interesting DTrace fixes and features, and had even burnt the 4 CDs and was all ready to commit to the Solaris way of life, I just got the heebie jeebies.
Hopefully, just hopefully, the FreeBSD port works out well, and there will be a version for Linux sometime soon... there's hope that the advent of the GPLv3 will ease a lot of political slash licensing problems.
DTrace is really incredible for application developers. You can insert lightweight, shippable, debugging and profiling points wherever you want them. I just feel you can't outright commit your project to it yet which is sad. It's the kind of stuff that should be made a POSIX standard, quite frankly.