DTrace

[Carsten Mattner]

For clarity, I'm most interested in DTrace because there's extensive
literature on using it effectively, it's supported on 3 platforms,
and if you're careful you can write portable DTrace scripts for
your debug work.

In Linux land they had a plethora of methods in and outside the
kernel, which they seems to be trying to tie together right now,
but it's still multiple "engines" in the kernel. You can either
use some domain specific language that gets compiled down to
BPF bytecode for interpreting in the kernel, or another of the
many solutions. There's no one tool, however imperfect, like
DTrace, which has allowed me to use the same script on macOS
and FreeBSD, and it's probable to work on illumos as well.
I've heard Systemtap has a DTrace compatibility layer, but
I never tried it and last time I read it was recompiling modules
and live-patching the kernel. That sounded really bad.

Anyway, I'm still dreaming that I might use those DTrace
scripts on other platforms as well, someday.

On 10/23/17, Sepherosa Ziehau <sepherosa at gmail.com> wrote:
> For kernel tracing, our KTR is pretty flexible and lightweight.
>
> On Mon, Oct 23, 2017 at 1:42 PM, Tomohiro Kusumi
> <kusumi.tomohiro at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I'm actually interested in DTrace.
>>
>> Regarding DragonFly, Matt doesn't want it.
>> To be exact I think Matt doesn't want SDT or its mechanism (FBT might be
>> ok).
>>
>> 2017-10-23 6:05 GMT+03:00 Predrag Punosevac <punosevac72 at gmail.com>:
>>> Carsten Mattner wrote:
>>>
>>>> I vaguely remember someone saying they're working on a DTrace port to
>>>> dfly.
>>>>
>>>> Has this progressed to a usable state?
>>>
>>> This is probably the message you were looking for
>>>
>>> On 2015-06-22  10:57:27 Tomohiro Kusumi wrote:
>>>
>>> "i'm actually wanting to do dtrace (maybe in the next 6 months or so)"
>>>
>>>
>>> This is the same Tomohiro who later announced porting HAMMER to FreeBSD,
>>> OpenBSD, and Linux. This is his GitHub profile
>>>
>>> https://github.com/kusumi
>>>
>>> and this is what he has actually contributed to the source
>>>
>>> http://gitweb.dragonflybsd.org/dragonfly.git?a=search&h=HEAD&st=commit&s=tkusumi
>>>
>>> Now in the mean time OpenBSD guys started some small steps towards
>>> DTrace
>>>
>>> https://jasperla.github.io/slides/eurobsdcon2017/#1
>>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJVGO9Nadi8
>>>
>>> so it might we worth talking to Jasper
>>>
>>> Best,
>>> Predrag
>
>
>
> --
> Tomorrow Will Never Die
>