One of the exciting things about OpenSolaris is that it’s released under a license — the CDDL — that allows ports of individual components to other systems. In particular, at my OSCON presentation two weeks ago, I discussed some of the expertise required to port one such component, DTrace, to another system. I’m happy to now report that Devon O’Dell has started working on a port to one such system, FreeBSD. This has been talked about before (in some cases, with braggadocio), but Devon is the first to start the work in earnest. And indeed, work it will be: DTrace isn’t a simple system, and it has several dependencies on other, Solaris-specific system components. That said, it should certainly be possible, and we on Team DTrace are available to help out in any way we can. So if you’re interested in working on this, you should ping Devon — I know that he’ll welcome the help. And if you have specific questions about DTrace internals (or anything, for that matter), swing by #opensolaris and join the party!
5 Responses
Bryan – Can you point me to some documentation on dtrace which explains in detail how it is implemented – at the kernel level primarily? (I am aware of the OpenSolaris CVS – don’t point me to it with a RTFS gesture!:)
Beware though – the information you are providing will be used for your worthy competitor’s benefit!! 😉
We very much believe that the documentation explaining the implementation should be contained in the source itself, so I’m afraid that RTFS is the right answer here. In particular, read the block comment at the top of
dtrace.c.
Bon appetit!
[Trackback] I thought Jonathan Schwartz’s invitation to Apple to base their Intel port on Solaris was bit silly, but I have to admit that there is a lot in Solaris 10 that would be nice to have in OS X/Darwin. DTrace
[Trackback] Last month Devon O’Dell started work on porting DTrace from Solaris to FreeBSD. Devon works for Offmyserver.com, which is providing him with hardware and support for the project. Bryan Cantrill, one of the developers at Sun working on DTrace, …
hey,
could we port dtrace to linux. systemtap does not provide good security and dtrace could solve the problem.
what do you think?
Kalpak