Re: Dtrace in FreeBSD

[coolvibe <coolvibe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 1 Jun 2006 12:53:13 +0100, Ashley Penney <apenney@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Guys,
> 
> Firstly I hope this works.  I'm posting via the news interface, so if
> anything is formatted weirdly, I apologise.

Looks fine to me. :)
 
> Secondly, is there anyone considering porting dtrace over?  Now that
> the majority of the work is done for FreeBSD, hopefully this will be a
> low difficulty task and would be hugely benefical for the debugging
> capabilities it opens up.  I have problems coding in shell, yet alone
> C, so I certainly can't help but I'd be willing to take part in any
> testing required if anyone is considering it.

I would like to have dtrace too, but porting it over involves a lot more 
than, say, porting over a driver or a minor subsystem over from FreeBSD.

Dtrace touches a very large part of the kernel since every system call 
would have to be instrumented (read: a lot of work). I'm not worried about 
the userland bits, I think they will work almost out of the box. The kernel
part of dtrace will be the bitch to implement.

So, I don't think you'll see Dtrace in DragonFlyBSD soon, but since Dtrace is
a very valuable thing to have, I do think that it will come to DragonFlyBSD
eventually.

And by the way, we're already getting ZFS. One cool Sun technology at a time
please. ;)

Cheers,
Emiel