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Sun Wins Top Tech Innovation Award
Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "Sun's DTrace trouble-shooting software won top prize in the Wall Street Journal's 2006 Technology Innovation Awards competition. It's the second time in three years that Sun took the top award. From the article, which also names a dozen other winners: 'Where most debugging takes place as software is being developed, DTrace analyzes problems with systems that are in production — running a company's database, say, or executing stock trades. It does this with a process called "dynamic tracing," which enables a developer or systems administrator to run diagnostic tests on a system without causing it to crash. Before DTrace, such tests often took days or weeks to reproduce the problem and identify the cause. With DTrace, performance problems can be tracked to their underlying causes in hours, even minutes.'"
Yea, this is the Wall Street Journal. It's like that old joke about Hollywood Squares: "According to Redbook, what is Plank's constant?" Not really an authoritative source on technical innovation.
If it can, that's great and can Sun kindly port it to Linux. If it can't, then all I can say is that the competition must've sucked this year.
what an ODD way to think of things!
"if it doesn't run on linux then its not worth an award"
such a small universe you live in...
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Careful with the accusations of Wall Street's credibility on the subject. The award was decided by a jury of fairly distinguished members of ye olde programming community. And just to be fair, "None of them voted on any entries in which their companies or organizations may have had an interest."
You need to improve your reading comprehension skills. That is not what he said at all.
It's so reliable you never need to look for problems.
The closest linux equivalent is the Systemtap project, which is based on the kprobes low level hooking API. These aren't yet billed as ready for production systems, but they'll get there soon enough. They look quite slick, also.
That said, the WSJ award seems to me to be maybe a little overstated. While Sun fanboys will shout to the heavens (with some justification, even) that DTrace is an amazing tool with absolutely no counterpart in the linux world, the fact remains that DTrace is at best an incrementally amazing tool. System performance tuning is a hard task, requiring smart developers and lots of work. System performance tuning with DTrace is a hard task requiring smart developers and a little less work.
System performance tuning using DTrace and a typical Solaris IT wonk (a population that tends to correlate highly with the fanboys pushing DTrace the hardest) is a recipe for disaster.
If you find someone telling you that DTrace is a must have tool and indispensable to the systems developer, apply salt. But yeah, it's pretty slick.
and maybe after it is ported to linux/*bsd and ten years have gone by, admins will actually start using it to its full potential.
Porting DTrace involves messing around in the kernel of the OS being instrumented, and since the GPL forbids mixing in non-GPL code, DTrace will never come to Linux.
I believe it has already been ported to BSD and is on the way to Mac.
I saw a demo of DTrace at Javaforum in Stockholm a week ago, it was VERY impressive stuff.
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
I think what he meant was the DTrace is a tool that most system admins would have no clue how to use. If they did start digging in code, attempting to "optimize" it, things would probably break...hard. He's not necessarily downing Solaris IT wonks, as much as he is the vast sea of IT wonks that are really bad at their job, but don't realize it. Basically, the majority of the IT industry. Since no one else (expect maybe a few FreeBSD wonks) has DTrace, it's fairly safe to narrow it down to Solaris wonks, and if you would trust a typical admin with DTrace and source code, you're a braver soul that most of us.
"Does this mean I think Sun don't deserve the award? I've not used that tool, so I'm not in a position to say. It would have to do a lot in addition to basic analysis to earn the right to be innovative, never mind the title of "top technical innovation". If it can, that's great and can Sun kindly port it to Linux."
First of all, it does. It's a new system tracing paradigm, and that's not a word I throw around lightly. Download OpenSolaris, install it, and then see what dtrace can do before you comment on it.
Secondly, you want it in Linux? Then why don't YOU port it? Why should Sun be bothered, when not only the design document but the actual source code is already available? Years ago, that was the rallying cry of Linux boosters: "Go write it yourself if you want it." Now I'm increasingly seeing the Linux camp DEMANDING that someone else do all of their work.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Sun definitely deserves an innovation award this year, but I would not have said it was for DTrace. DTrace is an incredibly nice tool, but I would put it well behind ZFS. ZFS is the first filesystem I have looked at in detail and liked everything I've seen. BeFS came close (I only found one thing I disagreed with in the design there), but ZFS does much, much more.
The UltraSPARC T1 is also a very nice chip, and possibly deserves this kind of thing, although I am more interested in the T2 since I tend to do a lot of FPU-intensive things.
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