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Microsoft Working on Porting Sysinternals To Linux (zdnet.com)
An anonymous reader writes: A Microsoft exec has confirmed yesterday that the company's engineers are working on porting the highly popular Sysinternals software package to Linux. Microsoft engineers have already ported the ProcDump utility and are currently working on porting ProcMon as well. More tools to follow.
Microsoft's decision to port this highly popular debugging utility to Linux comes after two months ago, in September, Scott Guthrie, Microsoft's executive vice president of the cloud and enterprise group, revealed that "sometimes slightly over half of Azure VMs are Linux." With Linux's growing adoption as the preferred OS for running Azure VMs, it's only natural that Azure engineers are now looking into porting their favorite debugging utilities to Linux, for both themselves but also for the company's customers.
Microsoft's decision to port this highly popular debugging utility to Linux comes after two months ago, in September, Scott Guthrie, Microsoft's executive vice president of the cloud and enterprise group, revealed that "sometimes slightly over half of Azure VMs are Linux." With Linux's growing adoption as the preferred OS for running Azure VMs, it's only natural that Azure engineers are now looking into porting their favorite debugging utilities to Linux, for both themselves but also for the company's customers.
To be fair, procmon is a pretty nifty GUI and can show you a lot of information in one place. More info than top.
One thing that's always bothered me on windows is the lack of a simple way to determine what DLLs are missing. A missing shared library in linux will be apparent with an error message from the linker when you try to run the executable. Or you can use the ldd command to determine what shared libraries it links to and whether they can be found on the system. On Windows, you just get an error dialog box that says the program won't run, with no information about what is missing. And it's not easy to find out what the missing dlls are either. You have to resort to DLL dependency walkers. In terms of tools Windows is a bizarre mix of complete deficiencies and the fanciest GUI tools.
Anyway it will be interesting to see what they come up with. The mere fact they want to port these highly OS-specific tools to Linux is very interesting, given MS's history with Linux. And we should be in favor of any tools that ease the transition away from a proprietary OS to something more open.
Now that they have Embraced Linux, now they are Extending Linux. I wonder what's next. ;)
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