As a follow-up to my DTrace and Oracle overview
presentation at the MSDBF …
I
highlighted that DTrace is not just a Solaris 10 tool. It could be ported to other
Operating Systems with Sun’s encouragement and BSD and OS-X are early
examples of this. I also mentioned that IBM are bringing out a
DTrace-like tool called probevue in new versions of AIX. Read some more thoughts
on this subject from one of the DTrace engineering team here
and here’s a
relevant forum discussion.
However,
the eagle-eyed Graham Wood from Oracle spotted that I glossed
over the possibility of DTrace being ported to Linux which is an increasingly
important option for Corporate Data Centres. Why did I (deliberately) gloss over it? I simply
didn’t know what the future of DTrace might be on Linux, but suspected that the
porting exercise might be inherently difficult for some imagined reasons. My
imagination was in gear because whenever I use system management tools on Linux
they don’t seem quite as good as those on big vendor Unixes. As usual, that
could just be my personal bias or maybe they need to mature a little yet?
(I’m really going to have to start justifying some of these lingering feelings.)
Anyway, I kept following this story and
Kevin Closson helped out by pointing out the existence of SystemTap on Linux
(which I’ve still to try out). Then I noticed this from another one of those DTrace guys!
Agree or disagree (I tend to agree), that’s a really entertaining blog and some
of the suggestions of plagiarism are pretty funny.
To get back to the original question from Graham and my
fuzzy answer, here’s what Adam
Leventhal thinks is involved in a Linux port, along with a discussion of the
licensing implications. Because, in the end, it looks like that’s what all of
this is about and I should have just said to Graham – ‘Won’t happen. Licensing.’
See what you think.
Oh, and the last
small item is a video via Andy C of Robert Scoble interviewing the DTrace
team.
If you want to follow what’s happening in the DTrace world, there are several blog links in the Unix section of my blog-roll, over on the right there.
nice round-up Doug. Personally the discussions seem to be driven by feature comparison between different platforms – what I liked about DTrace (and indeed the wait interface before it) was that it was driven by real performance problems (benchmarks weren’t fast enough) not must have instrumentation like the competition.