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.

Comments

How pointless is that

[fisted]

This is actually funny and sad. Don't the MS people realize that the only reason for using "sysinternals" is that their OS doesn't come with decent instrumentation by default? This toolset doesn't even come close to what's natively available in Unix or Linux.

smh

Re:How pointless is that

[slack_justyb]

Don't the MS people realize that the only reason for using "sysinternals" is that their OS doesn't come with decent instrumentation by default?

No.

This toolset doesn't even come close to what's natively available in Unix or Linux

Correct. However, no one wants to really learn how to use those tools. So that's where the demand for this comes from.

I guess the question, Should folks learn these tools? Should folks educate themselves? is the underlying question here. I know exactly how I feel but, how I feel doesn't change the mentality one bit.

Re:How pointless is that

[caseih]

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.

Re:How pointless is that

[MightyYar]

There is at least some benefit in having their entire team using a single tool across platforms. Apparently deemed worth the porting effort, anyway.

Re:How pointless is that

[llamalad]

I see we're well into the "extend" phase now.

Re:How pointless is that

[Anonymous Coward]

port these highly OS-specific tools to Linux

I'm thrilled to finally have regmon.exe on Linux. That's gonna be a life saver when systemd-registryd is rolled out!

Re:How pointless is that

[slack_justyb]

I'd say the people who don't want to learn how to use new tools would also not want to learn how to use a new OS?

One would think so. However, a lot of higher ups that would make the call to change the OS are not really concerned about the means, but more of the ends. So they see blah blah in marketing indicating Linux versus Windows, they instruct their underlings to get it done, and allocate all of zero time to the underlings getting properly trained. So the underlings resort to StackExchange to get day-to-day stuff done, wishing for a day where they could just use the tools they know to get day-to-day done. In this kind of environment you've got a statistical break. X% group will eventually pick things up by enough visits to Google, Y% will actually pick up a book and learn (maybe on their own dime outside of work), and Z% will just complain "Why can't this be easier?!" (incorrectly, mind you). It appears that Z% has tickled someone in the MS research department.

Project managers and the folks calling shots just see Apache, Tomcat, node.js, or whatever the ends are. Underlings are the ones actually dealing with the details Apache on Linux vs Apache on Windows.

Re:How pointless is that

[mangastudent]

In their favor, it's MIT licensed. That's hard to abuse in a way negative for Linux except by using patents.

Re:How pointless is that

[fisted]

strace, ltrace, hell, dtrace. if you have the source and aren't incompetent, gdb and valgrind.
are just the first few that come to mind.

Oh, you're looking for a tool *exactly* like file/regmon that craps out tens of thousands of lines in a piss poor performing text widget, faster than it can actually handle the input, so by default you have to add blacklisting filters (in addition to the dozen blacklisting filters that come preinstalled) to even narrow down the data to what you may be looking for? Yeah, sorry, I don't think that's happening, nor that anybody really needs/wants it. And it only makes sense for the classical Windows problem "something is wrong but nothing tells me even remotely what may be going on so I'll have to look at all processes and the kernel at the same time", anyway.

Re:How pointless is that

[whoever57]

ProcMon logs file accesses, registry accesses, and network activity.

So equivalent to strace?

Re:How pointless is that

[whoever57]

All you are doing is showing your ignorance of Linux.

strace provides the answer to your question.

The new code...

[reanjr]

The Linux port operates on the command line, and is simply two line bash scripts and aliases.

Re:I don't know how

[ctilsie242]

There is a difference. Back in the Halloween Documents era, MS wasn't making money from Linux. Now, they make money, hand-over-fist over Linux. That Android phone? MS makes something from each and every one of those. Azure? It doesn't really matter what OS people run on their cloud platform; they get charged for the VM anyway, so might as well make Linux work better.

MS is in an odd position where their financial interests lie in keeping Linux going, so if they want to port some of their useful utilities, more power to them.

with an EULA that gives MS full rights to your

[Joe_Dragon]

with an EULA that gives MS full rights to your system.

Extend?

[Gravis Zero]

Now that they have Embraced Linux, now they are Extending Linux. I wonder what's next. ;)

Re:Extend?

[stooo]

Next step is obviously Extinguish.
But this time it could be MS that gets extinguished...

BSOD

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi hope they port the BSOD screensaver from the sysinternals kit as well.

This is one step, not the goal. Someone got confus

[raymorris]

I think there are two possible explanations for this.

Most likely:
The boss figured out there is no reason for Microsoft to keep developing their own kernel when they can just slap their UI on top of Linux. The boss said "port the system internals to Linux". A programmer got confused and ported SysInternals", the toolkit for seeing the system internals.

Also likely:

The eventual goal is to switch the system internals to Linux.
In Agile fashion, Microsoft figured they'd start with a bite-sizdd chunk work that feels like it might be kinda going in that direction. It won't actually be used in the end, because it wasn't planned out, it was Scrumed.

Why?

[DarkOx]

Wouldn't it be easier to make a nice gtk front end for strace or something?

Why this is a good thing

[Anonymous Coward]

I understand there is a lot of skepticism about this, but I think this is great for the Linux community. While long-time Linux users will never use these tools, it makes the transition cost for the top-tier Windows users a lot smaller.

Most of the stereotypical Windows sysadmins have no idea what these tools are. Their standard troubleshooting involves rebooting, rebuilding, trying some magic registry key that once fixed another problem. Those users will stay in their comfort zone.

The Windows users that understand how an operating system works and truly understand how to use various tools to analyze a problem and troubleshoot it will be able to make the transition. Sure they will use the tools they are familiar with first, but these are the personality types that will adapt. They will not be the proponents to move more Linux into legacy enterprise environments. Many will become valuable contributors to the community.