Apple Quietly Fixes DTrace

In January we discussed a blog entry revealing that Apple had "crippled" its DTrace port. As the author notes in a followup post, to say that DTrace had been "crippled" was at least overstated: "Unfortunately, most reactions seized on a headline paraphrasing a line of the post — albeit with the critical negation omitted." In an updated entry, the poster notes that Apple has made good (so we have too): "One issue was that timer based probes wouldn't fire if certain applications were actively executing (e.g. iTunes). This was evident both by counting periodic probe firings, and by the absence of certain applications when profiling. The good news is that Apple has (quietly) fixed the problem in Mac OS X 10.5.3."

Comments

Took them long enough

[cibyr]

These sort of concurrency issues are bad enough when they're bug in your *own* code. When it's stuff in other apps producing what appears to be strange behaviour in your own (perfectly fine) code, that's a BIG problem.

This sort of issue wouldn't survive for a week on Linux.

Re:Took them long enough

[morgan_greywolf]

While it might have seemed to some that tinfoil hats were in order (and maybe some might think they still are), it seems to me that this was likely just a bug in Apple's port of DTrace. Does anyone know if they posted (or will post) any patches for DTrace upstream?

Re:Took them long enough

[Anonymous Coward]

Surely you could just recompile dtrace for mac os x without the check though?

Re:22 January - 11 June

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you really going to sit there and tell me that there are no bugs in Windows (or Linux) more than five months old? Don't be ridiculous.

Quietly, quietly

[gonerill]

What is the connotation of "quietly" supposed to be in stories like this? (Not just with Apple.) It seems like a weasel word. Is the intention to give the impression that Apple embarrassedly corrected themselves, or that they were forced to give into pressure from the developer community, but don't have the cojones to admit it, or what? Because, anyone honestly expecting something other than a "quiet" fix is deluded. Is a bug fix in DTrace supposed to get a slide at a Stevenote or something?

Re:Quietly, quietly

[stewbacca]

"Quietly" infers that the slashdot crowd should get credit, where no credit is due, as if our overwhelming numbers and sheer pressure forced Apple to change. Unfortunately, in the real world, we are such an insignificant demographic, that any changes are thus labelled as being done "quietly".

Re:Mac's Suck

[antifoidulus]

Don't use xcode?

Seriously, unless you are developing Cocoa(or Carbon) apps, there is very little reason to use XCode. There are better free software programs out there for writing c++ code, not to mention you could always just call good ol' gcc on the command line....

Re:22 January - 11 June

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't Windows one big bug? :P

Re:Mac's Suck

[mwlewis]

You must be joking. Have you ever written a project that had more than 5 C++ files? I work on projects that have dozens -- if not hundreds -- of different files, organized into multiple different directories, with many different library dependencies and different configuration options. Manually calling gcc is simply impossible, unless I want to waste half a day every time I need to compile something.

WTF? It's called a makefile. "Manually invoking" gcc goes something like this:

$ make

Good news doesn't sell

[snowwrestler]

The previous discussion generated hundreds of posts within a few hours, and topped out at 476. This one is at 60 comments after 3 hours and will be lucky to break 100. If you've ever wondered why Slashdot posts flamebait stories, there's your answer. "If it bleeds it leads."