[dtrace-discuss] University of Toronto's JIFL OS instrumentation system

[Adam Leventhal]

On Thu, Jul 12, 2007 at 04:49:13PM -0600, Peter Schow wrote:
> DTracers might be interested in reading about other dynamic OS 
> instrumentation technologies, like the University of Toronto's 
> JIFL system:
> 
>    http://individual.utoronto.ca/marek/jifl-eurosys07.pdf
> 
> They actually mention DTrace a few times, including in the "Related
> Work" section but seem to imply that they haven't tried it.

They did more than not try it -- they pretty much wrote it off. The focus
on this paper was efficient instrumention, and they asserted that trap-
based instrumentation would be slower than what they had developed; it
would have been nice for them to confirm this about DTrace.

The paper had some interesting ideas (though I'm not sure how much they
went beyond the work done UW-Madison by Barton Miller et al.), but proposed
some kernel instrumentation techniques which were a bit too exhilarating for
my tastes.

Adam

-- 
Adam Leventhal, Solaris Kernel Development       http://blogs.sun.com/ahl