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.'"

Comments

The real kudos go to the WSJ

[csoto]

After all, it takes a considerable amount of insight to pick a code analyzer (admittedly one as brilliant as dtrace) as important and newsworthy. Good job, guys! It shows you can look deeply at a topic and understand what makes computer systems valuable. A lesser effort would award something from Microsoft, Google or Apple, whose products are great, but lack the sophistication of many Sun innovations.

Re:The real kudos go to the WSJ

[I Like Pudding]

Sun open-sourced Dtrace. As such, somebody ported it to FreeBSD, and Apple picked it up for Leopard. The next version of Xcode is going to have a guified version called Xray built on top.

All in all, I'm really glad to see Sun getting back into the zone with some excellent products. Dtrace and Niagra might actually get me looking at Solaris once again. I don't particularly care for the that flavor, but it's stable as hell.

Re:The real kudos go to the WSJ

[TheRaven64]

Dtrace and Niagra might actually get me looking at Solaris once again. I don't particularly care for the that flavor, but it's stable as hell.

I have an UltraSPARC machine on my desk running Solaris 10. The kernel is a joy to work with; I write code to the POSIX specs and it just works. On Linux, OS X and FreeBSD I have to spend a few hours tracking down the little corner cases where they don't quite conform to the specs (don't talk to me about realtime signal delivery).

The init system is nice, but a little overengineered; I prefer RCng, although Launchd isn't too bad. The management GUI tools are nice, although they are real memory hogs (I OOM'd on a large compile job a few weeks ago because I'd left one running).

The rest of the userland, however, is a disaster. The filesystem hierarchy is GNU, BSD, or SysV depending on how you look at it, and many of the core utilities are missing useful options. The default shell doesn't do things like tab completion (or even have a history buffer), and the man pages seem to be formatted for printing not on-screen display.

It's a real shame, because the amount of effort required to make Solaris a really nice OS would be so small, but Sun aren't doing it. Hopefully OpenSolaris will start to take off, because I'd still like a Solaris kernel and a few other chunks of the base system in my next OS.

dtrace is a great peice of software

[QuantumG]

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. Now, if someone were to code a nice gui frontend to dtrace, that'd be innovation, because it would take an absolute master of UI design to turn using dtrace into something that was easy-to-do for the uninitiated.

Re:dtrace is a great peice of software

[bdash]

Apple announced that the Xray developers tool in the upcoming Leopard version of Mac OS X will leverage dtrace to perform application tracing, amongst other things. Take a look at the bottom section of http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/xcode.html for more information.

dltrace - libraries too

[ccoder]

try out dltrace http://labs.idefense.com/labs_05.php?show=5

It was released about 4/25, but doesn't show up when you look for dtrace - its works great in Linux/UNIX environments for tracing errors through different packages / libraries.

great job theif!

-Iridium

Re:This isn't so easy to copy

[j0el]

Dtrace is CDDL so it probably can not be ported to Linux. But systemtap is a good alternative and pretty far along. http://sources.redhat.com/systemtap/wiki/Systemtap DtraceComparison

http://sourceware.org/systemtap/

Overview

SystemTap provides free software (GPL) infrastructure to simplify the gathering of information about the running Linux kernel. This assists diagnosis of a performance or functional problem. SystemTap eliminates the need for the developer to go through the tedious and disruptive instrument, recompile, install, and reboot sequence that may be otherwise required to collect data.

The recent addition of kprobes to the Linux kernel provides the needed support but is not easy to use. SystemTap provides a simple command line interface and scripting language for writing instrumentation for a live running kernel. Over time, we plan to enlarge our script "tapset" library to aid instrumentation reuse and abstraction. We also plan to support probing userspace applications. We are investigating interfacing Systemtap with similar tools such as Frysk, Oprofile and LTT.

Re:dtrace is a great piece of software

[comay]

Please check out the Chime project which is about visualization software for DTrace. You can find more information at http://www.opensolaris.org/os/project/dtrace-chime / For those who think that DTrace is old news, I really suggest that you download one of the OpenSolaris-based distributions http://www.opensolaris.org/os/about/distributions/ and play around with DTrace. Yes, it's CLI is aimed at the geek in all of us but there is software like Chime and MacOS X's upcoming Xray which will help with those who prefer a different sort of UI.

Re:This isn't so easy to copy

[comay]

One of the most intriguing mashups of technology that's available today via OpenSolaris is BrandZ and DTrace http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/brandz/ BrandZ allows OpenSolaris Containers/Zones to take on different OS personalities and the primary personality is one that emulates Linux. Using DTrace, one can actually dynamically trace Linux applications running (without recompilation) under OpenSolaris.