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posted by martyb on Thursday November 03 2016, @09:29AM   Printer-friendly
from the those-who-do-not-learn-from-the-past dept.

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

Veteran dev says timed sampling's arrival in Berkeley Packet Filter makes Linux 4.9 a match for Solaris' DTrace

In 2004 former Reg hack Ashlee Vance brought us news of DTrace, a handy addition to Solaris 10 that "gives administrators thousands upon thousands of ways to check on a system's performance and then tweak ....production boxes with minimal system impact". Vance was excited about the code because "it can help fix problems from the kernel level on up to the user level."

Vance's story quoted a chap called Brendan Gregg who enthused about [the] tool after using it and finding "... DTrace has given me a graph of a hundred points that leaves nothing to the imagination. It did more than just help my program, it helped me understand memory allocation so that I can become a better programmer."

[...] As Gregg explains on his blog, Linux has had plenty of tracing tools for a long time, but they were miscellaneous kernel capabilities rather than dedicated tools and didn't match DTrace's full list of functions. But over time developers have worked on further tracing tools and Facebook developer Alexei Starovoitov recently offered up some enhancements to the Linux kernel that Gregg feels mean it now matches DTrace.

Gregg reckons Starovoitov's contribution, plus efforts like the bcc project he's worked on will offer Linux users their best ever chance to conduct really detailed tracing of Linux.

[...] Gregg's post has oodles more detail about DTrace's long history, plus links a-plenty to tools you can use to employ the tool.

Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/11/01/linux_in_2016_catches_up_to_solaris_from_2004/


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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 03 2016, @01:51PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 03 2016, @01:51PM (#422031)

    >So any predictions when it will be available on Windows?

    No but it's been included in FBSD's default GENERIC kernal since 2012 :-p

    https://wiki.freebsd.org/DTrace/KernelSupport [freebsd.org]

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