Tracing: no shortage of options [LWN.net]

Tracing: no shortage of options

Posted Jul 22, 2008 21:40 UTC (Tue) by bronson (subscriber, #4806)
Parent article: Tracing: no shortage of options

Also, Paul Fox is porting DTrace to Linux: http://www.crisp.demon.co.uk/blog/index.html  I
haven't tried it yet but I'm sure I will soon.

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Tracing: no shortage of options

Posted Jul 22, 2008 23:57 UTC (Tue) by SEJeff (guest, #51588) [Link] (3 responses)

DTrace on Linux is basicly a noop due to licensing conflict. Now what would happen if someone
wrote a syntax compatible "dtrace interpreter" that used systemtap and utrace, once it comes
out?

That would be a win/win because you have 1 language, D, for tracing events on two of the most
popular posix platforms.

Tracing: no shortage of options

Posted Jul 23, 2008 4:05 UTC (Wed) by willy (subscriber, #9762) [Link]

Four -- Linux, Solaris, MacOS and FreeBSD.  The other three already use DTrace.

Tracing: no shortage of options

Posted Jul 23, 2008 12:32 UTC (Wed) by fuhchee (guest, #40059) [Link] (1 responses)

It might not be hard for systemtap to parse dtrace's smaller scripting
language, but there's more to it than that.  A variety of dtrace
kernel and userspace features have no equivalent yet, so many real
dtrace scripts would not work.  Plus, may dtrace scripts use
type names/structs/fields that do not correspond to those in
linux, so one would need to change those scripts or create a
solaris emulation layer someplace.

Tracing: no shortage of options

Posted Jul 31, 2008 9:13 UTC (Thu) by renox (guest, #23785) [Link]

[[Plus, may dtrace scripts use type names/structs/fields that do not correspond to those in
linux, so one would need to change those scripts or create a solaris emulation layer
someplace.]]

Those issue are the same for FreeBSD, MacOS X, no?
And AFAIK they have not made a Solaris emulation layer, so Solaris-specific dtrace's script
won't work here either..

A compatibility layer with dtrace portable scripts would be nice, but compatibility with
OS-specific dtrace scripts doesn't matter much IMHO.