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

[Bryan Cantrill]

> >     Will researchers ever start looking at the many new problems that
> >     DTrace
> >     has opened instead of the old problems that DTrace has
> >     solved?  One hopes. 
> >
> >  
> > Where do these new problems list?
> >  
> 
> I believe Bryan is referring to the problems that you can now see in the 
> system using DTrace.  There isn't a specific list of problems.  In 
> nearly any given area, one could find room for improvement.
> 
> Another instrumentation tool which gives you the same data doesn't help 
> fix these issues.  Pointing DTrace at other parts of the system to get 
> data on the cause can help one find solutions to these age-old problems.

Yes, exactly.  The problem has transitioned from "how do we get data
on a running system?" to "given our ability to gather essentially
arbitrary data on a running system, what data do we gather and how do we
make sense of it?"  This is a much larger and much harder problem.  We're
seeing some exciting efforts to attack this from the developer tools side
(e.g., Apple's Xray, Sun's Project D-Light), but there is still much to
do to build on the data that DTrace can gather from production systems.
I would love to see researchers start to attack these problems if only
because (in contrast to the pre-DTrace era) they needn't (re)invent the 
wheel before working on the automobile (or the motorcycle or the
skateboard or the roller skate).  

	- Bryan

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Bryan Cantrill, Solaris Kernel Development.       http://blogs.sun.com/bmc