Sun Wins Top Tech Innovation Award 111
Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "Sun's DTrace trouble-shooting software won top prize in the Wall Street Journal's 2006 Technology Innovation Awards competition. It's the second time in three years that Sun took the top award. From the article, which also names a dozen other winners: 'Where most debugging takes place as software is being developed, DTrace analyzes problems with systems that are in production — running a company's database, say, or executing stock trades. It does this with a process called "dynamic tracing," which enables a developer or systems administrator to run diagnostic tests on a system without causing it to crash. Before DTrace, such tests often took days or weeks to reproduce the problem and identify the cause. With DTrace, performance problems can be tracked to their underlying causes in hours, even minutes.'"
The real kudos go to the WSJ (Score:5, Interesting)
dtrace is a great peice of software (Score:5, Interesting)
dltrace - libraries too (Score:2, Interesting)
It was released about 4/25, but doesn't show up when you look for dtrace - its works great in Linux/UNIX environments for tracing errors through different packages / libraries.
great job theif!
-Iridium
Re:dtrace is a great peice of software (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:This isn't so easy to copy (Score:2, Interesting)
http://sourceware.org/systemtap/ [sourceware.org]
Overview
SystemTap provides free software (GPL) infrastructure to simplify the gathering of information about the running Linux kernel. This assists diagnosis of a performance or functional problem. SystemTap eliminates the need for the developer to go through the tedious and disruptive instrument, recompile, install, and reboot sequence that may be otherwise required to collect data.
The recent addition of kprobes to the Linux kernel provides the needed support but is not easy to use. SystemTap provides a simple command line interface and scripting language for writing instrumentation for a live running kernel. Over time, we plan to enlarge our script "tapset" library to aid instrumentation reuse and abstraction. We also plan to support probing userspace applications. We are investigating interfacing Systemtap with similar tools such as Frysk, Oprofile and LTT.
Re:The real kudos go to the WSJ (Score:4, Interesting)
All in all, I'm really glad to see Sun getting back into the zone with some excellent products. Dtrace and Niagra might actually get me looking at Solaris once again. I don't particularly care for the that flavor, but it's stable as hell.
Re:dtrace is a great piece of software (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:This isn't so easy to copy (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:The real kudos go to the WSJ (Score:3, Interesting)
I have an UltraSPARC machine on my desk running Solaris 10. The kernel is a joy to work with; I write code to the POSIX specs and it just works. On Linux, OS X and FreeBSD I have to spend a few hours tracking down the little corner cases where they don't quite conform to the specs (don't talk to me about realtime signal delivery).
The init system is nice, but a little overengineered; I prefer RCng, although Launchd isn't too bad. The management GUI tools are nice, although they are real memory hogs (I OOM'd on a large compile job a few weeks ago because I'd left one running).
The rest of the userland, however, is a disaster. The filesystem hierarchy is GNU, BSD, or SysV depending on how you look at it, and many of the core utilities are missing useful options. The default shell doesn't do things like tab completion (or even have a history buffer), and the man pages seem to be formatted for printing not on-screen display.
It's a real shame, because the amount of effort required to make Solaris a really nice OS would be so small, but Sun aren't doing it. Hopefully OpenSolaris will start to take off, because I'd still like a Solaris kernel and a few other chunks of the base system in my next OS.