Oracle To Bring Dtrace To Linux 155
mvar writes "Dtrace co-author Adam Leventhal writes on his blog about Dtrace for Linux: 'Yesterday (October 4, 2011) Oracle made the surprising announcement that they would be porting some key Solaris features, DTrace and Zones, to Oracle Enterprise Linux. As one of the original authors, the news about DTrace was particularly interesting to me, so I started digging. Even among Oracle employees, there's uncertainty about what was announced. Ed Screven gave us just a couple of bullet points in his keynote; Sergio Leunissen, the product manager for OEL, didn't have further details in his OpenWorld talk beyond it being a beta of limited functionality; and the entire Solaris team seemed completely taken by surprise. Leunissen stated that only the kernel components of DTrace are part of the port. It's unclear whether that means just fbt or includes sdt and the related providers. It sounds certain, though, that it won't pass the DTrace test suite which is the deciding criterion between a DTrace port and some sort of work in progress.'"
FreeBSD? (Score:4, Informative)
If you want Dtrace and ZFS, just go with FreeBSD. You get pf and jails thrown in for the effort.
Re:Phasing out Solaris? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:FreeBSD? (Score:4, Informative)
Linux is released under version 2 of the GNU General Public License. This imposes a few restrictions and says that the code may not be distributed linked to any code that imposes more restrictions, nor can any derived works impose any more restrictions than are present in the license.
FreeBSD is released under the 2-clause BSD license, which says, basically, do what you want with this, just don't sue me if it doesn't work and don't claim you wrote it.
OpenSolaris was released under the CDDL, which is generally less restrictive than the GPL (no restrictions on what you can link it to), but adds some anti-patent clauses that are not present in the GPL. Because these restrictions are not present in the GPL, the GPL prevents CDDL code from being linked against it. This means that if ZFS or DTrace were ever ported to Linux by anyone other than the copyright holder they would not be allowed to distribute Linux along with their port.
In FreeBSD, ZFS and DTrace are optional kernel modules, so you can still build a system without them, but they are loadable if you are happy to accept the terms of the CDDL when you distribute FreeBSD. There's no technical reason why either couldn't be ported to any system (well, the Linux storage stack is a mess, so adding ZFS would be a bit harder, but it could be done), but few people are motivated to produce a port when they are not legally allowed to redistribute it.