Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by Fnord666 on Friday February 16 2018, @04:01PM   Printer-friendly
from the GPL-FTW dept.

Mark J. Wielaard has written a brief blog post about a crucial license change for the dtrace performance analysis and troubleshooting tool. It has been available for most other systems, notably Solaris derivatives, FreeBSD, and OS X, but not for Linux. That may change soon, or at least have the possibility to change.

At Fosdem we had a talk on dtrace for linux in the Debugging Tools devroom.

Not explicitly mentioned in that talk, but certainly the most exciting thing, is that Oracle is doing a proper linux kernel port:

commit e1744f50ee9bc1978d41db7cc93bcf30687853e6

Author: Tomas Jedlicka <tomas.jedlicka@oracle.com>
Date: Tue Aug 1 09:15:44 2017 -0400

dtrace: Integrate DTrace Modules into kernel proper

This changeset integrates DTrace module sources into the main kernel source tree under the GPLv2 license. Sources have been moved to appropriate locations in the kernel tree.

That is right, dtrace dropped the CDDL and switched to the GPL!

This change improves the utility of dtrace and gives a badly needed boost to Oracle's image. So will the license for ZFS be corrected next?

Source : dtrace for linux; Oracle does the right thing.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 3, Informative) by NotSanguine on Friday February 16 2018, @09:13PM (1 child)

    by NotSanguine (285) <NotSanguineNO@SPAMSoylentNews.Org> on Friday February 16 2018, @09:13PM (#639041) Homepage Journal

    What can it provide that strace and perf tools don't do better?

    IIUC, strace is purely a userspace tool. Dtrace has kernel components that can trace *through* system calls rather than just report that they were called and what was returned.

    --
    No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +1  
       Informative=1, Total=1
    Extra 'Informative' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   3  
  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by PocketSizeSUn on Saturday February 17 2018, @12:29AM

    by PocketSizeSUn (5340) on Saturday February 17 2018, @12:29AM (#639136)

    Yes strace traces to the kernel syscall boundary (hence the s).
    However perf traces through user and kernel functions.

    Linux has several tools with can trace through the kernel.
    I'm not sure what 'extra' thing DTrace can do, but I expect it has more to do providing a familiar tool for people fleeing the death of Solaris than anything that 'only' DTrace can do.

    http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2015-07-08/choosing-a-linux-tracer.html [brendangregg.com]