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DTrace

DTrace

Farewell to Bryan Cantrill

Bryan Cantrill, VP of Engineering at Joyent, earning $15.I've been expecting this automated mail for a while now, but it was disheartening nonetheless: List:...

Bryan Cantrill, VP of Engineering at Joyent, earning $15.I've been expecting this automated mail for a while now, but it was disheartening nonetheless: List: dtrace-discuss Member: bryan.cantrill@eng.sun.com Action: Subscription disabled. Reason: Excessive or fatal bounces.As one of the moderators of the DTrace discussion list, I see people subscribe and unsubscribe. Bryan has, of course, left Oracle and joined Joyent to be their VP of engineering.Bryan is a terrific...

DTrace

Apple updates DTrace... again

Back in January, I ranted about Apple's ham-handed breakage in their DTrace port. After some injured feelings and teary embraces, Apple cleaned things up a bit,...

Back in January, I ranted about Apple's ham-handed breakage in their DTrace port. After some injured feelings and teary embraces, Apple cleaned things up a bit, but some nagging issues remained as I wrote:For the Apple folks: I'd argue that revealing the name of otherwise untraceable processes is no more transparent than what Activity Monitor provides — could I have that please?It would be very un-Apple to — you know — communicate future development plans, but in 10.5.5,...

DTrace

Apple updates DTrace

Back in January, I posted about a problem with Apple's port of DTrace to Mac OS X. The heart of the issue is that their port would silently drop data such that...

Back in January, I posted about a problem with Apple's port of DTrace to Mac OS X. The heart of the issue is that their port would silently drop data such that certain experiments would be quietly invalid. Unfortunately, most reactions seized on a headline paraphrasing a line of the post — albeit with the critical negation omitted (the subject and language were, perhaps, too baroque to expect the press to read every excruciating word). The good news is that Apple has...

DTrace

dtrace.conf post-post-mortem

This originally was going to be a post-mortem on dtrace.conf, but so much time has passed, that I doubt it qualifies anymore. Back in March, we held the first...

This originally was going to be a post-mortem on dtrace.conf, but so much time has passed, that I doubt it qualifies anymore. Back in March, we held the first ever DTrace (un)conference, and I hope I speak for all involved when I declare it a terrific success. And our t-shirts (logo pictured) were, frankly, bomb. Here are some fairly random impressions from the day:Notes on the demographics at dtrace.conf: Macs were the most prevalent laptops by quite a wide margin, and a ton...

DTrace

DTrace and JavaOne: The End of the Beginning

It was a good run, but Jarod and I didn't make the cut for JavaOne this year...2005In 2005, Jarod came up with what he described as a jacked up way to use...

It was a good run, but Jarod and I didn't make the cut for JavaOne this year...2005In 2005, Jarod came up with what he described as a jacked up way to use DTrace to get inside Java. This became the basis of the Java provider (first dvm for the 1.4.2 and 1.5 JVMs and now the hotspot provider for Java 6). That year, I got to stand up on stage at the keynote with John Loiacono and present DTrace for Java for the first time (to 10,000 people -- I was nervous). John was then the...

DTrace

pid2proc for DTrace

The other day, there was an interesting post on the DTrace mailing list asking how to derive a process name from a pid. This really ought to be a built-in...

The other day, there was an interesting post on the DTrace mailing list asking how to derive a process name from a pid. This really ought to be a built-in feature of D, but it isn't (at least not yet). I hacked up a solution to the user's problem by cribbing the algorithm from mdb's ::pid2proc function whose source code you can find here. The basic idea is that you need to look up the pid in pidhash to get a chain of struct pid that you need to walk until you find the pid in...

DTrace

Mac OS X and the missing probes

As has been thoroughly recorded, Apple has included DTrace in Mac OS X. I've been using it as often as I have the opportunity, and it's a joy to be able to use...

As has been thoroughly recorded, Apple has included DTrace in Mac OS X. I've been using it as often as I have the opportunity, and it's a joy to be able to use the fruits of our labor on another operating system. But I hit a rather surprising case recently which led me to discover a serious problem with Apple's implementation.A common trick with DTrace is to use a tick probe to report data periodically. For example, the following script reports the ten most frequently...

DTrace

DTrace/Firefox/Leopard

It's been more than a year since I first saw DTrace on Mac OS X, and now it's at last generally available to the public. Not only did Apple port DTrace, but...

It's been more than a year since I first saw DTrace on Mac OS X, and now it's at last generally available to the public. Not only did Apple port DTrace, but they've also included a bunch of USDT providers. Perl, Python, Ruby -- they all ship in Leopard with built-in DTrace probes that allow developers to observe function calls, object allocation, and other points of interest from the perspective of that dynamic language. Apple did make some odd choices (e.g. no Java provider,...

DTrace

What-If Machine: DTrace Port

What if there were a port of DTrace to Linux? What if there were a port of DTrace to Linux: could such a thing be done without violating either the GPL or CDDL?...

What if there were a port of DTrace to Linux? What if there were a port of DTrace to Linux: could such a thing be done without violating either the GPL or CDDL? Read on before you jump right to the comments section to add your two cents.In my last post, I discussed an attempt to create a DTrace knockoff in Linux, and suggested that a port might be possible. Naively, I hoped that comments wouldexamine the heart of my argument,bemoan the apparent NIH in the Linux...