Systemtap - DTRACE for Linux?
I used to work on Solaris 10 , which has DTRACE far best troubleshooting utillity.
Had a chance to talk with first DTrace user Jarod Jenson.So if you need any help I am sure he will give you some hint..
Since Oracle is "forcing" Linux , in my new job guess what ... I am running Linux and of course once a while you will run into some problem but DTrace is not there ....
but Systemtap is very promissing...
SystemTap provides free software (GPL) infrastructure to simplify the gathering of information about the running Linux system.
Here is official page:
http://sourceware.org/systemtap/
also there is good link from Oracle Open World 2007
http://blogs.oracle.com/ezannoni/gems/OOW20073.pdf
Had a chance to talk with first DTrace user Jarod Jenson.So if you need any help I am sure he will give you some hint..
Since Oracle is "forcing" Linux , in my new job guess what ... I am running Linux and of course once a while you will run into some problem but DTrace is not there ....
but Systemtap is very promissing...
SystemTap provides free software (GPL) infrastructure to simplify the gathering of information about the running Linux system.
Here is official page:
http://sourceware.org/systemtap/
also there is good link from Oracle Open World 2007
http://blogs.oracle.com/ezannoni/gems/OOW20073.pdf
posted by Miladin at
10:14 AM
2 Comments:
I tend to disagree that systemtap is nearly close to what dtrace is doing or even promising. systemtap is not designed to be production safe, they are just "ASSUMING" that they are able to reach the same level of safety (you can read that up in the design paper). I tried systemtap before trying dtrace and i really thought it was horrible. It compiles kernel code that is injected into the kernel using insmod (very bad design decision) while dtrace runs a vm that is able to catch faults and isolate potentially harmful code from the rest of the system. systemtap is able to crash the system here or can introduce harmful code. i also needed a debug version of the kernel on the system i tested it which is not the case with dtrace. Also with dtrace you are able to trace languages like python,ruby or even php (with ustack helpers you can even get information like: where am i in my scripted code). there is also a way to give separate dtrace privileges to users (like userspace tracing and kernelspace tracing) so you can give appropriate privileges to different developers on the box (so nobody can snoop around here). If a want to write and ad-hoc dtrace script i can do that any time, while when using systemtap i would need the permission of the admin every time (everything else would be insane considering that we injecting kernel code here)
You might be interested that Paul Fox is porting dtrace to linux.
Regards,
Björn
I am Solaris guy myself and I agree that nothing come close to DTrace but at the same time you have to work with tools that you have.
I had a chance to review:
DTrace for Linux on:
http://blogs.sun.com/ahl/entry/dtrace_for_linux
Thanks for post.I will take a look at Paul site.
Regards,
Miladin
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