SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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/
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Entropy on Thursday November 03 2016, @06:04PM
If you've never used ZFS(from Solaris, now on Linux & others) it's worth a try. Snapshots that maintain performance, amazing interface, and volumes to physically back virtual machine storage(that also support snapshots). BTRFS has always been touted as a better ZFS, but it lags behind in many ways: No volumes for VMs, and snapshots for some reason always stay mounted(why would you want this?!) and read-write(again--why???). Not to mention stability.
Linux has been light years ahead of Solaris in quite a few ways, but some of the fundamentals suchs as DTrace and ZFS are amazing things that still haven't been adopted today.
(Score: 1) by tbuskey on Sunday November 06 2016, @12:14AM
Linux has been light years ahead of Solaris in quite a few ways, but some of the fundamentals suchs as DTrace and ZFS are amazing things that still haven't been adopted today.
Partly because they're reimplementing it a SystemTap and BTFS
I think the reimplementation of Zones as containers has gone much better. I wasn't doing enough with Crossbow to see how the networking compares.
Of course any new cool stuff is not going into Solaris. No one is paying a mass of developers to advance it and the ones that are developing it at Oracle or the companies around what was left in OpenSolaris won't share.
ZFS advancement is similar but OpenZFS is getting implemented on Linux and the BSDs too. I've happily replaces Solaris with ZFS on Linux since shortly after it came out.
(Score: 2) by Entropy on Sunday November 06 2016, @02:31PM
Yes, they are in a way trying to reimplement it. It's unfortunate that the focus seems against the features I find most important. Physical volumes(zvols) are making zero progress, and the rather intuitive interface is being left behind:
zfs snapshot myfiles/whatever@today
vs
btrfs subvolume create myfiles/whatever myfiles/whatever/whydoiwantthismounted
Then you have to deal with BTRFS having the snapshot mounted somewhere for tools like rsync to accidentally pick up, or deal with it being writeable by who knows what application or user accidentally. Suddenly your snapshot isn't a snapshot anymore. I kind of just wish they reimplemented the rather intuitive interface, and not leave behind enterprise important things like zvols, or pretend snapshots are a file copy operation.
I think btrfs can replicate changes nowdays, so that's good.