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

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?

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:Took them long enough

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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