How much did Sun pay for that? [LWN.net]

How much did Sun pay for that?

Posted Aug 17, 2005 13:59 UTC (Wed) by armijn (guest, #3653)
In reply to: How much did Sun pay for that? by rvfh
Parent article: Sun's Linux killer shows promise (Register)

It really depends where you'd want to use it. On a desktop I don't think
Solaris would be my first choice, because of lack of support of many
devices that I actually use. But on bigger servers there are features that Solaris has that I don't think will appear in Linux for quite some time.
One of the things that springs to mind is dtrace. The thing about articles like these is that they always focus on one aspect and then extrapolate.

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How much did Sun pay for that?

Posted Aug 17, 2005 14:29 UTC (Wed) by ajross (subscriber, #4563) [Link]

DTrace seems undeniably slick. At least it does for the serious hacker working on system-level performance-limited tasks, which is (very sadly) a rather small and rapidly shrinking demographic. The average IT guy isn't going to get much use out of it.

But as with everything else, if it's really useful it won't be alone for long. The underlying framework for doing this kind of thing in linux is already present in kprobes. I googled the subject; here's someone's blog where they flame a bit about how much better DTrace is than kprobes for the working sysadmin:

http://uadmin.blogspot.com/2005/08/dtrace-equivalent-for-...

But they also link to this paper from IBM:

http://www-03.ibm.com/servers/enable/linux/power/pdfs/lop...

Which points out this project:

http://sourceware.org/systemtap/

...who appear to be working right now on a user-friendly front end to kprobes. There's definitely source in there; I have no idea what level of maturity they have reached, or whether their approach will pan out.