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SCO Open Sources System Activity Reporter
diabloii writes "SCO will license its System Activity Reporter (SAR) source code to the open source community in cooperation with Starnix, Inc. SAR is currently used to retrieve data for administering the UnixWare 7 System V Release 5 (SVR5)
kernel. SCO is hoping that the release of SAR will help standardize kernel administrative. Read the press release here. Also more info at freshmeat. " SAR will be released under the Mozilla license, under the 2nd phase of the release. In the first phase, it will be ported to *BSD and Linux, with the help of Starnix.
Hmmm...
I reserve a cautious optimism about this development.
On the one hand, I'll take any contributions to the pool of open source software we can get, provided it's worth something. I'm not aware of any really decent open source performance monitoring packages previously available so this package may prove interesting.
OTOH, SCO is not famous for being particularly friendly to Open Source concepts, and as others have pointed out, something like 25% of them is owned by Microsoft.
It's interesting that this announcement is being made by a company who's CEO, Doug Michels, has been known to have done some truly venomous FUD spewing about Linux in the past. He has also claimed that the supposed venomous FUD spewing was actually a result of the press misquoting him or quoting him out of context.
Maybe it's true that SCO has some respect for the open source concept and the press WAS misquoting Michels on these occasions. It wouldn't be the first time that the press tried to artificially give the impression of a conflict.
This development may or may not be evidence of SCO's real attitude toward open source. Time will tell, and this is a development worth watching.
Well, IRIX ships with a version of sar. I'm not sure what relationship it has with the sar that SCO is donating, but it can do a lot of stuff:
- Report CPU utilization
- Report buffer activity
- Report activity for each block device, i.e., disk drives
- Report TTY device activity
- Report system calls
- Report system swapping and switching activity
- Report graphics activity
- Report use of file access system routines
- Report average queue length while occupied, and % of time occupied
- Report status of process, i-node, file tables and record lock tables
- Report message and semaphore activities
- Report paging activities
- Report translation lookaside buffer (TLB) activities
- Report unused memory pages and disk blocks
- Report system heap statistics
- Report interrupt statistics
It will also log this activity so you can monitor things over time.
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
This is good news; one of the things I miss most on Linux/*BSD is SAR (and SysV ps). :)
Two notes:
1) Regarding Doug Michels' "FUD"Ding: check out
http://www.sco.com/linux/letter.html. Not the big bad wolf you thought he is; why wasn't _this_ put up here? (yes Rob, you _do_ have a sensationalist streak
2) AFAIK Microsoft owns less than 10% of SCO, and can't make a move to grab the rest: SCO's contract with IBM says IBM've got dibs. It's also an employee-owned company (although I really don't know exactly how that's supposed to stop takeover - not an economistic bone in my body).