Q&A: Sun exec ponders OpenSolaris, Linux (ComputerWorld) [LWN.net]

Q&A: Sun exec ponders OpenSolaris, Linux (ComputerWorld)

Posted May 15, 2008 15:13 UTC (Thu) by dmag (guest, #17775)
In reply to: Q&A: Sun exec ponders OpenSolaris, Linux (ComputerWorld) by afalko
Parent article: Q&A: Sun exec ponders OpenSolaris, Linux (ComputerWorld)

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.

to post comments

Q&A: Sun exec ponders OpenSolaris, Linux (ComputerWorld)

Posted May 15, 2008 15:23 UTC (Thu) by afalko (guest, #37028) [Link] (2 responses)

Wow, DTrace is amazing. Are the annotations something that can be  contributed to the OSS
community? There is no way an OSS equivalent can be made?

DTrace

Posted May 15, 2008 15:35 UTC (Thu) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]

See this article from last August.

Q&A: Sun exec ponders OpenSolaris, Linux (ComputerWorld)

Posted May 15, 2008 15:37 UTC (Thu) by dmag (guest, #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.)