[ug-bosug] Fwd: A straightforward, useful project

[Venky]

This should be an interesting project for someone interested in
figuring out more about DTrace.

Venky.

----- Forwarded message from Bryan Cantrill <bmc at eng.sun.com> -----

From: Bryan Cantrill <bmc at eng.sun.com>
To: dtrace-discuss at opensolaris.org
Date: Wed, 14 Jun 2006 22:32:12 -0700
Subject: [dtrace-discuss] A straightforward, useful project
User-Agent: Mutt/1.4.2.1i
Sender: dtrace-discuss-bounces at opensolaris.org


If this whole OpenSolaris birthday celebration has anyone interested
in a fun DTrace project, here's one that's both relatively straightforward
and tremendously valuable:  add a stable "log" provider that adds an SDT
probe to log_makemsg() in the kernel.  Why is this useful?  So when you
see messages like "foodaemon[1234]: strdup: out of memory" and you're
wondering "now where the hell is _that_ happening?" you can do something
like this:

   # dtrace -n log'/strstr(args[0], "strdup") != NULL/{ustack()}'

In this particular case, you can discover -- as I did using FBT -- that
get_pam_conf_entry() has really, really crappy error messages.

Anyway, this project wouldn't be too much work -- it would be a matter
of figuring out what of the available information at the entry to 
log_makemsg() is valuable in a stable way (and potentially adding a
translator) -- and you would be a hero to sysadmins and daemon developers
everywhere...

Anyway, just a thought.  Let us on Team DTrace know if you're interested
in this...

	- Bryan

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