Oracle offering DTrace for Linux

Posted Feb 22, 2012 23:38 UTC (Wed) by dlang (guest, #313)
In reply to: Oracle offering DTrace for Linux by kragil
Parent article: Oracle offering DTrace for Linux

even assuming that they aren't doing anything questionable with the licensing. The fact that they are shipping with dtrace doesn't mean that the dtrace patches are going to be acceptable to the upstream kernel (that's been a large part of the problem with other tracing solutions)

I do look forward to the discussion though.

Oracle offering DTrace for Linux

Posted Feb 22, 2012 23:52 UTC (Wed) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link] (2 responses)

A big part of the supposed benefit of DTrace has been "You can just do this stuff and it's safe and will do exactly what it says on the tin". If they deliver that on Linux then it will be far harder to argue that it shouldn't get merged. If they can't deliver that on Linux then it will be far harder to argue that DTrace is serving any purpose other than putting an Oracle-flavour stamp on things.

The middle option is that they deliver some of it, but only gradually "it's beta, of course it crashes but that'll get fixed" and meanwhile the alternatives mature to a similar level of robustness and production-worthy reliability.

Oracle offering DTrace for Linux

Posted Feb 23, 2012 9:42 UTC (Thu) by robert_s (subscriber, #42402) [Link] (1 responses)

"A big part of the supposed benefit of DTrace has been "You can just do this stuff and it's safe and will do exactly what it says on the tin". If they deliver that on Linux then it will be far harder to argue that it shouldn't get merged."

DTrace managed to do that for Solaris largely because it has a much more closed-box kernel.

Oracle offering DTrace for Linux

Posted Feb 24, 2012 13:40 UTC (Fri) by davecb (subscriber, #1574) [Link]

I'd suggest it did it not because the kernel was closed, but rather that the compiler shoved the functionality into a really cramped little closed box, so it had trouble causing the traced programs problems, either directly or even by side-effect.

--dave