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dtrace on Linuxdtrace on LinuxPosted Sep 21, 2008 4:43 UTC (Sun) by njs (guest, #40338)In reply to: dtrace on Linux by zooko Parent article: KS2008: Tracing
That sounds accurate.
I note that proprietary hardware drivers *suck* in many, many ways. They make your system impossible to provide support for, which is kind of a problem for a product whose core market is high-end enterprise production servers. They break things horribly and regularly -- and dtrace is obviously *much* more intrusive than your average driver. They're a huge pain to use and maintain -- is there any reason to think that the guy porting dtrace will be more successful at tracking linux mainline than RH's engineers are with systemtap? And will it even be possible to load as a module, or will you have to patch your core kernel/rebuild/reboot?
And, perhaps worst, they create all kinds of obnoxious arguments that divide the community -- look at any discussion of nvidia drivers, or the dtrace discussions here. Part of the magic of FOSS is that normally the enthusiasts, the law-skirters, the enterprise distros, the big-iron vendors, the small consultants, etc. etc. can all work towards common goals, and all provide necessary value at different parts of a system's lifecycle. When people spend their time yelling at each other over whether nVidia's drivers are legal or whether systemtap/btrfs/whatever is worth the effort, we all lose.
Which maybe shouldn't be surprising, since all the evidence suggests that one of Sun's strategic goals in choosing to license dtrace and ZFS in a Linux-incompatible way was to create exactly this sort of division within the FOSS community, and thus give Solaris a competitive chance. What I'm still not clear on is which of these titanic monsters you're going after, exactly...
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dtrace on Linux Posted Sep 21, 2008 12:39 UTC (Sun) by zooko (subscriber, #2589) [Link]
Wait, that's a different argument. The original statement by bronson was Argument 1: that the licensing issues make dtrace "undistributable by anybody, so therefore not of any practical interest". NJS added that it "only matters if major distros start redistributing it".
But this original argument is not true. At least, it is true only inasmuch as it is also true that the licensing issues of nvidia drivers make them undistributable by anyone, so therefore not not of any practical interest.
Now you're making two other arguments. If I understand correctly, Argument 2: If people do use kernel modules or patches with this kind of legal restriction, it is hard to support and tends to break. and Argument 3: It distracts the community with inflammatory bickering about legal issues.
I don't necessarily disagree with either of those. I personally have gone to great effort to get Free Software drivers for my graphics cards. On the other hand, I have occasionly fallen back to using the proprietary graphics card drivers when needed. I think it could be useful to people to understand that even if the latter two arguments are valid, the first one wasn't: dtrace and ZFS are exactly as legally-portable-to-linux as are proprietary graphics card drivers.
Regards,
Zooko
P.S. Oh wait, I'm not sure if I agree with Argument 2. Argument 2 is a strong argument when we're talking about proprietary, closed-source software, but dtrace and ZFS are Free and Open source, so I'm not sure that it would be as fragile and problematic as proprietary drivers.
dtrace on Linux Posted Sep 21, 2008 18:38 UTC (Sun) by njs (guest, #40338) [Link]
>But this original argument is not true. At least, it is true only inasmuch as it is also true that the licensing issues of nvidia drivers make them undistributable by anyone, so therefore not not of any practical interest.
It's still of no practical interest to kernel developers, distributors, enterprise users, and many others. Jon's (not bronson's) comment was totally reasonable in context -- a kernel developers' discussion about what enterprise-funded developers should work on!
But fair enough -- there may be (probably are) others who find linux-dtrace of practical interest.
But arguments 2 and 3 are linked to this -- to the extent that such people use linux-dtrace, the harms described in those arguments swing into effect. To the extent they avoid linux-dtrace, the harms are abated -- with a trade-off: then they lose dtrace's benefits. There's a tragedy of the commons danger here; the costs of supporting inscrutably broken systems and inflammatory bickering are borne by the community, while the benefits of dtrace are received only only by individuals. Plus, people using/supporting linux-dtrace are not doing themselves any favors in the long run, because it's clearly a dead-end; it's better than nothing, but getting a great solution will require abandoning it and switching to one of the other systems that linux-dtrace sucks the oxygen away from.
So I guess 2 & 3 are arguments for why if we encounter someone for whom linux-dtrace is of practical interest, we should attempt to stop them ;-).
>dtrace and ZFS are exactly as legally-portable-to-linux as are proprietary graphics card drivers.
As a side-point, I'm actually not convinced, at least for dtrace. The nvidia driver uses two tricks: it makes a serious attempt not to be a derived work of the kernel, by including a Free shim layer to basically a windows driver. And it's always distributed separately from the kernel -- otherwise you're distributing a combined, thus derived, thus un-distributable, work. Even the little distros that tried to play fast and loose seem to have given in on this point.
Dtrace is far more intrusive than a graphics driver, and in copyright relevant ways -- it needs to muck around with other people's code to put hooks in. That makes both of the above tricks hard to achieve. Maybe not impossible, I don't know. From his rhetoric about licenses, I haven't gotten the impression that Paul Fox is being that careful. I would not tell people that linux-dtrace as it exists is legal to distribute at all without knowing many more details.
>Argument 2 is a strong argument when we're talking about proprietary, closed-source software, but dtrace and ZFS are Free and Open source, so I'm not sure that it would be as fragile and problematic as proprietary drivers.
It's true the problems are worse for proprietary drivers, but they're quite bad even for plain old out-of-tree drivers. (Note part of the discussion above is about RH's systemtap team's trouble keeping sync with mainline!) And worries about license contamination are an extra burden on top of that.
Sorry for nattering on so!
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