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DTrace Becomes Usable on FreeBSD 128

Posted by Hemos from the trying-it-all-out dept.
daria42 writes "A project to port Sun Microsystems' Dynamic Tracing (DTrace) tool to FreeBSD appears to have achieved some initial success. DTrace was open sourced last year and is one of the coolest features in Solaris 10."
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DTrace Becomes Usable on FreeBSD More

DTrace Becomes Usable on FreeBSD

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  • Cool. (Score:3, Funny)

    by grub ( 11606 ) <slashdot@grub.net> on Monday May 29, 2006 @09:40AM (#15424332) Homepage Journal

    Now we can have Netcraft confirmation of the death with a long DTrace log to back it up.

  • DTrace scripts (Score:5, Informative)

    by Life700MB ( 930032 ) on Monday May 29, 2006 @09:46AM (#15424355)

    Here you got some dtrace scripts [tpg.com.au], direct from my firefox bookmarks.


    --
    Superb hosting [tinyurl.com] 20GB Storage, 1_TB_ bandwidth, ssh, $7.95

  • STUB! (Score:5, Funny)

    by corychristison ( 951993 ) on Monday May 29, 2006 @09:52AM (#15424381)
    This description is a stub. Please help extend it by contributing some real information!

    ... sorry. :-P

  • Sorry, but DTrace is a really great feature regardless of what your political OSS views are. Porting it to BSD only makes it that much cooler.
    • The point is how useful the gathered info is. In my experience more or less all OSs do not have problems with stats one can gather. It's the stats one can NOT gather.

      E.g. under Linux most of the memory is file cache. What would you gain by knowing that cache went from 95% to 96% of RAM and then went down to 94%?If you can't dissect the value (e.g. 10% belong to that file, 20% to that process, 40% are that info, etc) nor change the behaviour of kernel - there is no point in knowing that info.

      And again, if th
    • Sorry, but DTrace is a really great feature regardless of what your political OSS views are. Porting it to BSD only makes it that much cooler.

      There are lots of "really great features" you could put into an OS. The devil is in the details. What's the cost of maintaining it? What is the actual utility? Etc.

      I think DTrace doesn't come out well in that regard. Pretty much all the things people regularly want to measure already have hooks in BSD and Linux. Furthermore, if one is going to put something of D

  • HAH! (Score:1)

    by wmajik ( 688431 )
    You think this will let my employer figure out where that memory leak is coming from?! You can't trace me! I've got... TraceBuster!

    (Ok that was seriously cheesy, but I relive the golden days of my youth by quoting movies with Marky Mark apparently. *sob*)

  • Not ready for -CURRENT? (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 29, 2006 @11:26AM (#15424682)
    Dtrace is one of the best Unix development tools around, no joke. However the project is nowhere near available for FreeBSD users....

    From Bryan Cantrill's blog: "If you run FreeBSD in production, you're going to want John's port as it stands today -- and if you develop for the FreeBSD kernel (drivers or otherwise), you're going to need it."

    Now compare this to Birrell's announcement: "There is still a lot of work to do and while that goes on, the code has to remain in the FreeBSD perforce server. It isn't ready to get merged into CVS-current yet."

    Great news and nicely done... but, um, come back when it's ready for -CURRENT primetime before telling Zdnet it's ready ;)
    • "Now compare this to Birrell's announcement:..."

      Also from tfa:

      According to Birrell, the FreeBSD DTrace port passes 793 of Sun's 1039 tests for the application.

      "That means that there are some very exciting traces that can be done on FreeBSD right now," he said. "Every syscall can be traced, including those that are loaded in kernel modules. Every function in the kernel can be traced from the low-level interrupts up."

      While it's not as useful as the Solaris DTrace, it certainly looks like it's re

  • Highly desirable toolkit, but not universal. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 29, 2006 @12:43PM (#15424970)
    I saw Bryan Cantrill give a demo of DTrace at my university. I was pretty impressed.

    I wanted to use it for my application to diagnose performance and race condition problems. However, then I realized I'd have to wrap all the instrumentation so that it would still work portably. Then I thought it seemed like an awful lot of bother just to get some profiling in there, especially if I was going to support an alternate method of collecting the same events so as to make the whole application (which includes profiling support) portable.

    "Sorry, we have to run it on Solaris or FreeBSD to debug/optimize" was ultimately what made me stay away from it. I looked into getting OpenSolaris working, and by the time I'd finally finally discovered from Sun's extremely confusing website and the equally confusing OpenSolaris webpages that what I wanted was Solaris Express:Community Release (SX:CR) so that I could get some interesting DTrace fixes and features, and had even burnt the 4 CDs and was all ready to commit to the Solaris way of life, I just got the heebie jeebies.

    Hopefully, just hopefully, the FreeBSD port works out well, and there will be a version for Linux sometime soon... there's hope that the advent of the GPLv3 will ease a lot of political slash licensing problems.

    DTrace is really incredible for application developers. You can insert lightweight, shippable, debugging and profiling points wherever you want them. I just feel you can't outright commit your project to it yet which is sad. It's the kind of stuff that should be made a POSIX standard, quite frankly.
    • I have also heard about this tool and wanted to try it out but didn't have Solaris. From reading about it, it appears to be very system specific for speed reasons, I think you could get it to work with porting effort, or perhaps adding a virtualization layer. A hack would be a VM w/no cost Solaris.
      • There is way too much FUD around people who "thought they wanted to try DTrace but it was just too hard to get Solaris running". That's a total cop-out. So it took you a few clicks to download Solaris Express-- big freakin' deal. If you're not willing to put in a little time to get Solaris running, you won't reap the reward. Solaris runs out of the box on tons of hardware, including VMware. Just grab a free copy of VMware, then load a free copy of Solaris and you're done. It'll take you an hour (after
  • ... they use the public domain. public domain is the stem cell
    of licensing, whereby you can take such code and graft any damnfool
    license onto it if you have the inexplicable urge to think smaller.

    oh, and real men don't use 'dtrace', they use 'printf()' --
    if it's good enough for ritchie & thompson, it's good enough for me!

  • Green Hills Software already has a product which can trace anything. I think it does it by recompiling (or relinking?) the software with its proprietary compiler. But once you do that you can trace anything, not just system code. Seems like a cool product if you have the dough. Here's more info, with screenshots: http://www.ghs.com/products/timemachine.html [ghs.com]
  • I've read about dtrace and wanted to try it for awhile, posts to BSDForums haven't helped me either. I don't have it in my ports tree, and it's not listed on Freshports: http://www.freshports.org/search.php?query=dtrace & search=go&num=10&stype=name&method=match&deleted=e xcludedeleted&start=1&casesensitivity=caseinsensit ive [freshports.org]

    Anyone know how to get ahold of a copy? I've created ports before so I'm not afraid to try some 'testing' version.

    Thanks

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