from the micro$oft-please-stop-breaking-my-world-view dept.
Michael Larabel writes in Phoronix about Microsoft's new open-source process monitor for Linux:
Microsoft's newest open-source Linux software is ProcMon for Linux, a rewritten and re-imagined version of its Processor Monitor found on Windows within their Sysinternals suite.
Microsoft's ProcMon tool is a C++-written, open-source process monitor for Linux that makes it convenient to trace system call activity. This ProcMon Linux version is open-source under an MIT license.
Microsoft released the source code to their ProcMon Linux version on Thursday and is marked as a 1.0 preview release. Microsoft is also making available a Debian/Ubuntu package of this preview build.
The Phoronix article includes a gif demonstrating ProcMon. To my amateur eyes, this looks like htop without the resource monitoring and instead has some stack tracing capabilities. Has anybody given Microsoft's ProcMon a test drive? What are your thoughts?
Related Stories
Over at ACM.org Yegor Bugayenko reviews how companies benefit from open source:
'Tis the season to be jolly, and many people around the world are getting those warm, fuzzy holiday feels. One of the things that makes us programmers feel warm and fuzzy is open source software. With open source, you can easily see the code and documentation, and better yet, you can use it too. A lot of companies support open source as well, providing funding, labor power, and code for free.
Why give something away for free? A lot of individuals contribute open source code out of a genuine sense of altruism. Yet when it comes to companies, it's often a strategic choice, and one they expect to benefit from.
[...] Why go through all the trouble? Let's take a look at the tangible benefits of supporting open source, especially from the perspective of tech giants like Google. Let's start by looking at how companies support open source.
The author goes on to list benefits for companies that support open source, citing Google, Microsoft, IBM and Adobe as examples. He also mentions how Red Hat benefited from its acquisition by IBM. He concludes:
So what's the take away for all of this? Open source is a great resource for the community, sure, but it's also a valuable resource for companies. Open source provides sales, influence, branding, retaining and training opportunities, among others, for companies. And for individual programmers, open source projects offer a way to build skills, increase knowledge, and make connections.
Previously:
CentOS Linux 8 Will End in 2021
Open Source's Eric Raymond: Windows 10 Will Soon be Just an Emulation Layer on Linux Kernel
Microsoft Releases Open-Source Process Monitor for Linux
Google Takes Down Repositories that Circumvent its Widevine DRM
(Score: 5, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 18 2020, @11:57PM (10 children)
It's like htop, but with added telemetry. First it uploaded my /home directories to Redmond for analysis, then downloaded a Windows 10 installation iso and asked "Do you want to upgrade your OS? [Yes/OK/Sure]". I opened a console and typed " kill -kill procmon" and it proceeded to upgrade my system to Windows 10. But on the plus side, no more systemd.
(Score: 5, Funny) by Opportunist on Sunday July 19 2020, @12:55AM (9 children)
So... Win10 or systemd...
Is "just shoot me" an option?
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 19 2020, @12:59AM (5 children)
Devuan - goofy name, no systemd.
Slackware - do they still use tarball "package management?" Still good, though.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Sunday July 19 2020, @02:14AM (2 children)
PCLinuxOS ... another goofy name, no systemd.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 19 2020, @03:08AM (1 child)
VAX/VMS . . . . no systems either.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 19 2020, @10:04AM
ZOS?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 19 2020, @05:17AM
Gentoo
(Score: 2) by turgid on Sunday July 19 2020, @01:51PM
Yes, I'm running slackware64-current on five machines.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 19 2020, @01:13PM
VOID. BSD-style rolling release distro. Uses runit, which is scriptable. Simple install, very well maintained.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Sunday July 19 2020, @02:36PM
You forgot to mention it also includes three privesc vulnerabilities, eight buffer overflows, and two wormable 0days.
(Score: 2) by bart on Friday August 07 2020, @08:00PM
Void linux runs very well, and no systemd. Boot and shutdown times a few seconds, rolling release but very stable.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 19 2020, @12:32AM (4 children)
Looks like a curses-based command-line tool, eh?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 19 2020, @12:58AM (3 children)
Yes, ncurses front end using bcc [github.com] and sqlite3 based storage. It's by the sysinternals guys, good to see the borg haven't fully assimilated them yet.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 19 2020, @01:02AM (2 children)
Sysinternals guys were real cool dudes, super frood, knew where their towels were, complete opposite of the utter turlingdromes, back when I had to deal with Windows stuff.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday July 19 2020, @01:06AM (1 child)
IIRC, Sysinternals was bought out by Microsoft. It wasn't a Microsoft project, until it became successful enough to purchase. I mean - it COULD HAVE become real competition to Microsoft, worse they could have made Microsoft look bad.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 19 2020, @01:49AM
Sysinternals were just a bunch of dude(tte)s that produces system tools for Windows. Their stuff was awesome useful for those who had to manage Windows computer networks, particularly for those that came from UNIX/VAX world and expected such tools to exist but didn't until the Systeinternans guys came along.
They were never a competition to MS.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Zinnia Zirconium on Sunday July 19 2020, @01:06AM (11 children)
Something wrong with top and strace?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Sunday July 19 2020, @01:08AM (6 children)
Now that you ask - yes there is something wrong with them. They don't have Microsoft's official stamp of approval.
I'm suspicious of anything that Microsoft wants to install on a Linux machine. Didn't Poettering work for Microsoft before he started systemdestroying Linux?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 19 2020, @02:57AM (1 child)
The work history section of Pottering's wikipedia page does not mention Microsoft.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 19 2020, @03:09AM
Use Wikipedia's history feature and you can see it in an earlier version, likely changed so as not to damage his Linux creds. It's the period that now shows as "In federal prison for pedophilia".
(Score: 5, Informative) by Marand on Sunday July 19 2020, @04:11AM (2 children)
You're probably thinking of GNOME creator Miguel de Icaza, who was a Microsoft fanboy from the start, worked an internship at MS early on, and was so enamoured with Microsoft's way of doing things that he brought both the registry [wikipedia.org] (deprecated now but its replacement [wikipedia.org] isn't particularly different) and .NET [wikipedia.org] to Linux as parts of the GNOME project. He's also been an advocate of Microsoft's OOXML format [slashdot.org] and, after decades of pro-Microsoft advocacy, finally got his wish and became an employee of Microsoft via their acquisition of Xamarin [microsoft.com], a company he created specifically to focus on spreading the use of .NET to non-Windows places like Android, iOS, and Linux.
Like Poettering, his "contributions" to Linux are controversial and sometimes detrimental, though at least you can see that Poettering is pro-Linux even if his way of showing it is questionable. Miguel, on the other hand, is a long-time mac user [tirania.org] that has complained more than once about how horrible he thinks Linux is in comparison. Kind of ironic that the person that started GNOME has never given much of a shit about Linux. Says a lot about GNOME's way of doing things, really.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 19 2020, @08:52AM (1 child)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 19 2020, @03:20PM
there was once a ... norton commander, for like DOS? oh and ... laplink!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 19 2020, @01:18PM
" Didn't Poettering work for Microsoft before he started systemdestroying Linux?"
Redmondhat.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 19 2020, @01:47AM
Thanks but I'll stick with gnome-system-monitor
(Score: 3, Informative) by deimios on Sunday July 19 2020, @05:21AM (1 child)
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Monday July 20 2020, @04:18AM
"__anonymous__" So that's their new name for telemetry?
(Score: 4, Informative) by RamiK on Sunday July 19 2020, @12:54PM
Most admins prefer htop since top and strace have a undiscoverable interface that has you reading through the man pages and googling for answers where with htop you browse the menus.
That out of the way, what you should be asking is whats wrong with htop. And the answer is that it's GPLed and it's made by a Portuguese speaking Brazilian Muslim developer.
If you're wondering what that has to do with anything, consider Microsoft is a USG government contractor that provides cloud service that may include built-in user-land and kernel backdoors that the USG doesn't want the admins and users to know about. So, by having their own MIT licensed htop clone, they can denylist* the relevant backdoor processes.
*blacklist for those not yet up-to-date on Newspeak 2.0.
compiling...
(Score: 5, Insightful) by SDRefugee on Sunday July 19 2020, @01:16AM (6 children)
Hell will freeze over before I put ANYTHING MS on my systems. I spent my working years doing "Windows janitorial services" and when I retired I
decided I was DONE with anything to do with Microsoft. They have REALLY "jumped the shark" with Windows 10. I am so thankful it's no longer my
job to wrestle with junk like that...
America should be proud of Edward Snowden, the hero, whether they know it or not..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 19 2020, @01:57AM
No shit. Wowee... A MS Open-Source Process Monitor for Linux. What a useful tool. Does it work on native Fedora? Does it call home?
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Sunday July 19 2020, @04:29AM (4 children)
What do you do when your family whines that they absolutely must have MS Office and all those high end PC games? They so do not care about the freedom to examine the code, they're lusers.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Sunday July 19 2020, @05:02AM (1 child)
I answer "sorry, I don't know windows."
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 19 2020, @04:02PM
I answer "sorry, I don't do Windows."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 19 2020, @03:25PM (1 child)
heh, didn't know those half-life health stations require a alien bug to be squished to work...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 19 2020, @05:33PM
uh-weeh, no windows was harmed or bothered in obtaining this information, pinky-swear!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 19 2020, @03:43AM
Why?
It is from Microsoft, that should be all you need to hear to know to keep as far away from it as you possibly can get.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 19 2020, @07:49AM (2 children)
Admiral Ackbar says, "It's a tcrap!" Death to micro$oft. Early obsolescence to micro$oft! Not a real operating system, and anyone who runs it deserves the heap of scorn that any self respecting Soylentil will dump upon them. (Nota Bene: we have several non-self-respecting Soylentils, notable is the janrinok hisself, and chromas? Who is all Microsoft up the ying-yang?) Winter is coming, people, winter is coming.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Gaaark on Sunday July 19 2020, @01:37PM
"Winter is coming, people, winter is coming."
Not the Star Wars reference you're looking for.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 4, Insightful) by HiThere on Sunday July 19 2020, @01:54PM
That's a bit over the top...but only a little bit. I might use something from MS if I really needed what it could do, and nothing else could serve, and it had been reviewed by people I tested, and the source was not only open, but used a Free Software build chain. But I'd want to run it behind a firewall that had only a couple of open ports...both of which I monitored.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by srobert on Sunday July 19 2020, @05:50PM
Why would I want to use any MS software to monitor my Linux system? Plenty of tools already exists for that.
Why do I hear an echo from an old Pink Floyd song?
You have to be trusted by the people that you lie to.
So that when they turn their backs on you,
You'll get the chance to put the knife in.
(Score: 2) by PinkyGigglebrain on Monday July 20 2020, @11:00PM
I'm guessing that since it is just a proc monitor MS is still in the "Embrace" part of their doctrine.
Or is this the start of their "Extend" phase?
"Beware those who would deny you Knowledge, For in their hearts they dream themselves your Master."