Name: DTrace
ISBN: 9780132091510

tanelpoderJul 2024

Brendan Gregg's site (and book) is probably the best starting point (he was involved in DTrace work & rollout 20 years ago when at Sun) and was/is instrumental in pushing eBPF in Linux even further than DTrace ever went:

https://brendangregg.com/ebpf.html

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watersbDec 2016

Brendan Gregg? What does he know about Solaris?!?

(I keep the DTrace book within reach when I sit at the keyboard. This is fan mail. Many thanks, for your work has helped me become a better computer person.)

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profquailApr 2013

If anyone is interested in learning DTrace in detail, Amazon has a fairly comprehensive text:

http://www.amazon.com/DTrace-Dynamic-Tracing-Solaris-FreeBSD...

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stingraycharlesJun 2021

Sun developed DTrace the kernel building blocks, Brendan Gregg became an expert on it and made scripts that actually did useful stuff with them. The VIP was selling a GUI around Brendan Gregg’s scripts.

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BurningCyclesMar 2019

>Again, even when it was CDDL it wasn't a real problem. See ZFS.

ZFS is not in the Linux kernel, and Linus has stated that he will never merge CDDL licensed code due to license incompability.

Those Linux distros that distribute ZFS do so as a separate module, not part of the Linux kernel.

DTrace was GPL licensed too late (2018), something even Brendan Gregg stated as he finds eBPF more capable (and he is a leading expert on DTrace).

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iheartmemcacheJan 2016

So, background info. B. Gregg was at Sun before the evil Oracle acquisition. He quite literally wrote the book[0] on DTrace. Now he's at Netflix (i.e., he has as far as I can tell no vested interest in either that Docker/Solaris derivative [his interest is probably just getting great performance out anything that works rather than some plebian Mirage/unikernel vs on-the-metal BS we saw on Friday]). (Side-note, if you're reading this Mr. Gregg, your 2009 cheatsheet for DTrace[1] saved me countless hours on a production FreeBSD machine circa 2011. I owe you big.)

I've read his work on-and-off for a long time and there's little no to incendiary click-bait junk, or bias in most (if any) of what he publishes. Obviously he can't dedicate 60-hour resources a post-doc might, but he conducts most of his tests with rigor, and this blog post is no exception to the high-standards to which he presumably holds himself. I'd love to see Anil (one of the MirageOS leads (co-founder IIRC; pedigree - PhD from Imperial or Oxbridge)) comment. Either way, this is an example of how one should construct posts (I know we're not in academia, but there's no excuse for that absolutely abysmal post[2] made on Friday).

Thanks for raising the caliber of conversation, my good man.

[0] http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0132091518/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...

[1] https://blogs.oracle.com/brendan/resource/DTrace-cheatsheet....

[2] https://www.joyent.com/blog/unikernels-are-unfit-for-product...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10953766 for the discussion

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