[dtrace-discuss] DTrace under Linux
Jim Mauro
James.Mauro at Sun.COM
Wed Feb 14 07:55:55 PST 2007
Thanks Francois for sharing that.
The material for those sessions can be found on the www.solarisinternals.com
site (scroll down and look for "Solaris Internals & Performance Class
Material").
For each of the 3 sessions I did in Canada, I came away from each
grinning from
ear-to-ear, recalling my favorite Bryan Cantrill quote - "With DTrace, I
can walk
into a room of hardened technologists and get them giggling".
Thanks,
/jim
Francois Dion wrote:
> On Wed, 2007-02-14 at 20:08 +0800, é™¶æ· (Euler Tao) wrote:
>
>> Is DTrace talked about in the book, "Solaris Internals. Edition 2"?
>> I haven't got this book. But someone told me that this book maybe the
>> most detail book about Solaris kernel code.
>>
>
> You are talking about:
> http://www.sun.com/books/catalog/solaris_internals.xml
>
> This is definitely the book to learn about the Solaris kernel and how
> processes work in Solaris. Part two in particular:
> PART TWO: The Process Model
> Chapter 2: The Solaris Process Model
> Chapter 3: Scheduling Classes and the Dispatcher
> Chapter 4: Interprocess Communication
> Chapter 5: Process Rights Management
>
>
>
> For something that is pretty much all about DTrace, take a look also at:
> http://www.sun.com/books/catalog/solaris_perf_tools.xml
>
> Solaris Performance and Tools: Dtrace and MDB techniques for Solaris 10
> and OpenSolaris.
>
> This book is *great*. It is the companion to Solaris Internals edition
> 2. I've learned a good bit with this book, highly recommended.
>
>
> As a side note, Jim Mauro, one of the author has just done 3 days up in
> Canada:
> http://www.exitcertified.com/newsandevents/eventdetails/2007/solaris_roadshow/
>
> covering process tools and dtrace and mdb. Apparently this was quite an
> impressive session, some linux users in academia and the business world
> were impressed enough to want to take a look at Solaris, just because of
> dtrace.
>
> I believe this was the full length version of the presentation that
> George Wilson did at Sun Tech Days Atlanta, a real nice presentation
> too. I dont have a link for it, but I believe this presentation is
> available in open/star office presentation format. Or maybe just in pdf.
> Do take a look at that.
>
> Francois
>
>
>> 2007/2/14, Sean McGrath - Sun Microsystems Ireland
>> <sean.mcgrath at sun.com>:
>> ???? (Euler Tao) stated:
>> < Thanks, I understand now.
>> <
>> < er... I've planed to read the source code of DTrace. I think
>> it may be
>> < consisted of two parts, the kernel of Dtrace and the 30K+
>> providers.
>> < And is the main code of DTrace in a separate directory in
>> the whole kernel
>> < code tarball, e.g. on-src-b56.tar.bz2.
>> < I've searched the key word, "dtrace", in the web page,
>> < http://cvs.opensolaris.org/source/.
>> < And I was confused by the results. They looked a little
>> disordered.
>>
>> Dtrace may look 'disordered'. You're probably finding all the
>> dtrace probes points etc that are scattered all over the place
>> in various
>> modules, libraries etc. The bits that really make up the
>> dtrace framework
>> are better explained from Bryan's blog, below.
>>
>> <
>> < I have no experience on reading any Solaris's Codes yet.
>> < Can someone do me a favor? Give me some hints.
>>
>> Dtrace was the original bit of code that was opened up
>> before the full
>> opensolaris, way back. Bryan's blog gives us a tour of the
>> dtrace code
>> from this initial code:
>>
>> http://blogs.sun.com/bmc/date/20050125
>>
>> Its still good to go through this once in a while.
>>
>> That along with the dtrace usenix paper gives a good
>> overview of how
>> dtrace works along with where it lives in opensolaris.
>>
>> http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/content/dtrace/dtrace_usenix.pdf
>>
>> That should help you get started :)
>>
>> Sean.
>> .
>> <
>> < Thanks!
>> <
>> < Regards
>> <
>> < T.J.
>> <
>> <
>> < 2007/2/14, Casper.Dik at sun.com <Casper.Dik at sun.com>:
>> < >
>> < >
>> < >>Why do you say that SystemTap only is done on i386?
>> < >>Does it means that, compared with DTrace, SystemTap is
>> focused more on
>> < >>hardware infomation?
>> < >
>> < >Dynamic kernel probing tools like DTrace need to understand
>> and modify
>> < >the instruction streams in the kernel.
>> < >
>> < >>Does DTrace has two different kernel parts?
>> < >>I means for the x86 and SPARC architecture, there're
>> something different
>> < >>inside the 2 DTraces?
>> < >
>> < >Yes; DTrace is atypical in that it requires quite intimate
>> knowledge
>> < >of how instruction streams work. But from a user's
>> perspective this
>> < >is all hidden and you can use the same scripts on both
>> architecture.
>> < >
>> < >The DTrace architecture limits the knowledge of the
>> processor architecture
>> < >to the DTrace to the providers which need that knowledge
>> (such as the
>> < >fbt and fasttrap provider)
>> < >
>> < >Sun has a requirement for "completeness", i.e., support for
>> all
>> < >architectures,
>> < >when putting a project in Solaris. That's why we have
>> support for DTrace
>> < >on all supported platforms.
>> < >
>> < >In Linux, it is possible that systemtap becomes mainstream
>> without support
>> < >for other architectures. (Systemtap is also much more
>> limited and does
>> < >not
>> < >make the safety guarantees DTrace makes)
>> < >
>> < >Casper
>> < >
>>
>> < _______________________________________________
>> < dtrace-discuss mailing list
>> < dtrace-discuss at opensolaris.org
>>
>>
>> --
>> Sean.
>> .
>>
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