Sun dtrace developer Bryan Cantrill reports on the progress being made by John Birrel on porting dtrace to FreeBSD. “While John has quite a bit further to go before one could call it a complete port, what he has now is indisputably useful. If you run FreeBSD in production, you’re going to want John’s port as it stands today – and if you develop for the FreeBSD kernel (drivers or otherwise), you’re going to need it (once you’ve done kernel development with DTrace, there’s no going back).”
This is going to go along way on improving FreeBSD. I’ve been keeping tabs on Johns work from his website, I can say it’s exciting to see.
Is Linux next, or CDDL is not allowed?
Until then, http://uadmin.blogspot.com/2005/08/dtrace-equivalent-for-linux-only…
The CDDL is fine with porting DTrace to Linux. The problem is the GPL.
Since the author of this comment is allready linking to my blog content, I thought I would give the link to my blog entry where I give my thoughts on the current state of Development on Linux/Systemtap, linux’s answer to dtrace.
http://uadmin.blogspot.com/2006/05/systemtaplinux-being-left-in-dus…
and here is another one that gives info on why systemtap developers are making there life harder than necessary to give the hardcore kernel hackers a bit more functionality while normal users and developers wait for a solution that may never come to Linux
http://uadmin.blogspot.com/2006/05/systemtaps-complexity-continues-…
You could always look into using BrandZ on Solaris if you wanted to use Dtrace on Linux apps.
I wish they’d release at least this part under a better license. This is one of those things I’d love to see EVERYWHERE.
better? – thats pretty subjective!
I think you need a better OS
. Now define “better”, in context of software license.
I wonder if Haiku wouldn’t mind having this.
How so? the issue isn’t CDDL, but the GPL; if the GPL/GNU community wish to play the game of ‘nigel no mate’ then so be it, they’ve isolated themselves off from the ecosystem through their arrogance, and quite frankly, its their own fault.
I for one as a FreeBSD user are excited to see this, not only will it yeild better performance monitoring for FreeBSD servers, but also help FreeBSD developers to monitor and track down bottlenecks in the system.
The license is too restrictive/icky to make it into OpenBSD.
I for one as a FreeBSD user are excited to see this, not only will it yeild better performance monitoring for FreeBSD servers, but also help FreeBSD developers to monitor and track down bottlenecks in the system.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m excited to see it too. I think it’s a great thing for FreeBSD. I’ve kept an eye out for news off and on since I heard it was happening. But the CDDL is an issue for some. Maybe this port will help open it up.
Correct me if I am wrong, but my understanding is that all BSD’s are under the same BSD licence – or has OpenBSD added some clauses to theirs?
Pardon my ignorance, but I haven’t really investigated OpenBSD that much.
It’s not an issue with the BSD license, it’s an issue with the OpenBSD developer’s ideology. CDDL is quite likely not “free enough” per their viewpoints. I would seriously be surprised to see it put into OpenBSD due to this.
You’re d**m right. Arrogance is an understatement.
But that’s the problem with religion.
Even the religion of stallman.
True, true.
Having emailed Stallman; I have no qualms with an individual with strong views, but at the same time, the likes of Stallman and his ‘followers’ seem to throw out all reason in favour of some puritanical view of opensource.
They’re out of touch with reality; 99% of users don’t care about the source code of something; 99% don’t even know what source code is, let alone how to programme, so the whole logic of ‘give them freedom to modify’ is rubbish.
The simple fact remains, that opensource can’t work in every occasion, but Stallman thinks that it is the ‘wave of the future’ – sorry, the ‘wave of the future’ is a compromise; opensourcing the things that play no strategic importance in a product, and keeping stuff close source which are unique to the company.
Aka, keep the HTML rendering engine opensource, but create a value added user interface and services ontop.
Edited 2006-05-28 03:55
They’re out of touch with reality; 99% of users don’t care about the source code of something; 99% don’t even know what source code is, let alone how to programme, so the whole logic of ‘give them freedom to modify’ is rubbish.
No, it’s not rubbish. The whole logic of “giving them freedom to modify” is why they have a choice of something different than Windows.
Without the freedom to modify, there would be no Mac OS X (or it would run on a NT-kernel), there would be no *BSD’s, and there would be no GNU userland, and no Linux kernel, no FreeType, no Firefox, no Thunderbird, no Camino, no Safari, no Syllable, no Haiku, no AROS. You can continue the list.
All of these exist because of the freedom to modify. Even major parts of SkyOS exist because of the freedom to modify (FreeType and GNU userland in SkyOS being some of them).
“They’re out of touch with reality; 99% of users don’t care about the source code of something; 99% don’t even know what source code is, let alone how to programme, so the whole logic of ‘give them freedom to modify’ is rubbish.”
They don’t care because they don’t know any better. The people
who bring up your kindergatten logic are usually people not
familiar with the complexity of software development. It is
not a matter of religion, it is a matter of necessity for
many users to have access of source code if they are
to be productive or profitable. And no, “99%” of users do
not constitute college kids surfing for porn and downloading
music to their Ipods. Many software users do need to
have the freedom to customize and extend software to
effectively accomplish their tasks. Users from multi-national
corporations, to 5 men team of researches at a university,
to the 12 year old geek trying to customize his music
player, to governments, to scientists and many. The only
person out of touch with reality is you.