Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 3rd Aug 2007 15:42 UTC
Talk, Rumors, X Versus Y "Last week at OSCON someone set up a whiteboard with the heading 'Tools We Wish We Had'. People added entries (wiki-style); this one in particular caught my eye: 'dtrace for Linux, or something similar'. So what exactly were they asking for? "
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We'll help
by bgregg on Sat 4th Aug 2007 04:15 UTC
bgregg
Member since:
2007-08-04

G'Day - I'm the "Brendan Gregg" who Adam referred to in his blog entry. I've used DTrace heavily since early 2004, including authoring most of the scripts in the DTraceToolkit. Several months ago I joined Sun.

I do feel sorry for the Linux end users. Before I joined Sun I did use Linux (and Solaris), and frequently worked with Linux professionals. I know how they feel (and I felt).

DTrace was publically available and CDDL'd over two years ago. There was already a precedent for non-GPL code in the Linux kernel (nvidia and others). But instead of porting DTrace to Linux, we've had two years of license battles and promises. How does that help me, the end user? ... Hello?

I'd still love to see DTrace on Linux - one reason is so that I can port the DTraceToolkit to Linux. I'm looking forward to it as I really love writing DTrace scripts, and as a performance and troubleshooting guy the capabilities of DTrace are mindblowing. DTrace will be a big part of my life until the day I die; and I'm hoping that Linux can be part of that too.

There are others like me in the DTrace community who will no doubt help to make Linux DTrace a success. Just like we'll strive to help make MacOS DTrace a success, and wherever else DTrace is ported to.

If (or when) the DTrace Linux port does finally happen, I'll not only help out with scripts, but I'll help out with how-to documentation and presentations too. No need to borrow without asking. ;-)

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