

Dtrace on Linux - systems
http://blogs.sun.com/bmc/entry/dtrace_on_linux

======
nailer
I make the majority of my income from Linux. My longest job was at _large
Linux company_ , who makes most of its revenue replacing Sun hardware.

There is very little I like about Solaris. Ancient tools, badly named
packages, a messed-up filesystem that puts binaries in /var, very few
supported apps on x86, and ZFS, which solves the mid 1990s pre-san problem of
having massive amounts of data connected to individual hosts, rather than use
a SAN filesystem, like, er, everyone.

DTrace, however, shits all over SystemTap, for the following reason: * I can
understand DTrace * I cannot understand SystemTap

This might be a massive problem with SystemTap documentation, but I doubt it -
RHEL usually has better doco than Sun does.

~~~
bayareaguy
DTrace is the result of a few people dedicated to making it work well. It has
been around for a few years and has had time to mature. I'm so glad to have it
on OSX. Even so, it's a little irritating that to make good use of it you need
to dig through a lot of Solaris stuff.

SystemTap looks like a catchup effort by a group with other interests. This
thread made for intersting reading: [https://lists.linux-
foundation.org/pipermail/ksummit-2008-di...](https://lists.linux-
foundation.org/pipermail/ksummit-2008-discuss/2008-June/000149.html)

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st3fan
From reading that kernel summit mailing list thread I get the impression that
the Linux folks only think that dtrace is useful for system administrators and
kernel developers.

What they fail to realize is that by supporting dtrace they will make Linux a
better _application development platform_ too.

I've been in many situations where I am developing code on Linux (in C or C++)
and where I need to understand what is happening in my code or the system. The
current tools on Linux are either completely underpowered or non-existent, so
I frequently move code to my OS X box or even to OpenSolaris running in
VMWare. Just to use dtrace.

~~~
gaius
I honestly can't see what's in it for Sun here. They have an excellent, free
kernel of their own in OpenSolaris. Dtrace is one of Solaris crown jewels.
What possible advantage could it be to them to invest in two different free
Unixes?

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Create
dupe. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=236494>

