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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.'"
They are pretty much completely unrelated. I think you could get dtrace to do what strace does, but strace is a special-purpose tool of very limited scope. If you think they are comparable then you don't know anything about drace.
DTrace has a degree of OS integration that makes it non-trivial to copy, linux's alternatives don't even come close even though a tool like this would be very useful in linux.
For the foreseeable future, if you want to have this type of debugging on your server then the server has to run Solaris. And if your server is bigger than a 4-way then it makes sense that it's a Sun server.
There is value in premium gear, and while it won't make Sun the next Dell, it can hopefully help improve their standing in their core market.
And this is /. where folk think strace == dtrace
With strace can you trace everything from I/O operations through to system calls to monitor your live application without taking anything offline and get almost no performance hit?
Like it or not, dtrace is a huge innovation - it's also open sourced and coming really soon to an operating system near you. I think anyone involved in major application deployments is going to welcome dtrace and think it worthy of the award.
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.
Sounds like they've put those HP founders to work, instead of just parading them around in t-shirts.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
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.
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
strace is more like Solaris's truss, except truss is quite a lot better. IMO dtrace is for more serious debugging, tools like truss & strace are quick and dirty tools for easy to solve problems where just knowing the system call and their return values is enough to diagnose the issue.
Several people have mentioned strace, but I have yet to see anyone mention oprofile. I haven't used dtrace before, but oprofile allows you to see where an application is spending it's time transparently, with negligible performance hit, and without restarting the application.
oprofile has been around since late 2002 it seems, so it's not particularly new either. How does dtrace compare to oprofile?
Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!
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.
How we know is more important than what we know.
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."
I used to work for Sun and DTrace is da bomb to put it mildly. It has ZERO impact on real-time execution and can even see into the OS (if you use Solaris). I've built many a real-time system over the years and having this tool would have saved me countless hours of debugger time and logic analyzer time. The one down side to Dtrace is that it does so much it is hard to Master. There is a week long course Sun reccomends before you really can get the most for your efforts. I think it deserves a place on the Innovation shelf right beside the T1 chipset. And there are plans to port a version to Linux, but it may not be free. It also probably won't be able to see as deep into the OS layers as it does with Solaris but that will come in due time. Sun's license isn't 100% compatiable with the Linux GPL either so that could be another issue
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.