Yes, the actual source code of the JVM, Perl and Ruby interpreters have been annotated so that
DTrace can easily find out what's going on at a high level. (I think MySQL too). Even for
"normal" programs, DTrace can still trace any function in the symbol table. Some name mangling
required for C++.
http://developers.sun.com/solaris/articles/dtrace_cc.html
It's pretty neat that it can work over the whole OS (kernel thru scripts thru apps). For
example, you could get a list of the incoming TCP connection data vs your perl script
subroutines vs database queries.
Q&A: Sun exec ponders OpenSolaris, Linux (ComputerWorld)
Posted May 15, 2008 15:37 UTC (Thu) by dmag (subscriber, #17775)
[Link]
Yes, the extra probes are already OSS. DTrace is already OSS (CDDL), as is the whole Solaris
kernel, including ZFS.
The OpenSolaris OS is mostly OSS, except for a few programs. Work is underway to eliminate
that (for all I know, there could already be a distro that ships the CDDL kernel with a 100%
OSS userland).
http://www.opensolaris.org/os/downloads/
The packages available for OpenSolaris tend to be crufty (old, not much selection if you are
into 'new' tools such as nginx or git.)