Re: [tlug] DTrace article

[Edward Middleton <emiddleton@example.com>]

Christian Horn wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 07, 2008 at 04:47:55PM +0900, Edward Middleton wrote:
>   
> > Is anyone actually using SystemTap?  Both the Linux port of DTrace[1] 
> > and SystemTap look a long way from prime time last time I checked.  Have 
> > they got utrace doing anything useful?
> >     
>
> Havent used SystemTap yet, guess its just all the performance-
> problems i as a sysadmin stumbled upon yet were obvious enough to
> not have to dive into the application with SystemTap.
>   

My impression having installed and tried to run the basic SystemTap 
examples is that it is starting to get enough of the kernel 
infrastructure in place so that some tracing is possible, but all the 
user level tool and library development doesn't seem to have started.  
Last time I checked there wasn't enough documentation to really do 
anything useful with.

On the other hand the DTrace port uses all the SUN DTrace userland tools 
but appears to be a long way from having the kernel drivers sorted.  It 
also appears Paul is using some of the CDDL code in the kernel driver 
which will make it impossible to merge into the mainline kernels.  I 
don't think this projects prospect are all that great unless he can get 
mainline kernel developer buy-in.  The are too many internal changes 
between kernel revisions that will inevitably break this if the 
maintainers don't support it.

Edward