Oracle To Bring Dtrace To Linux

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.'"

Phasing out Solaris?

[eln]

So, are they porting Solaris functionality to OEL as a precursor to phasing out Solaris entirely? It would suck to see Solaris go from a nostalgia point of view, but it never made much sense to me why one company would continue to develop two Unix-like operating systems.

Re:FreeBSD?

[airencracken]

Because the CDDL (which dtrace and zfs are licensed under) is incompatible with the GPL, but not the BSD license.

Re:Too Late...WE DONT NEED IT...we got SystemTap

[_merlin]

You obviously haven't had to use both in anger. SystemTap is another "me too" project like so many things on Linux, where the only people saying it's as good are the people who haven't used the product it's an imitation of. Oh, and then there's the RMS type who will say it's "better because freedom has value" or something to that effect. Doesn't help you when you're actually trying to tune an application for performance.

Re:Phasing out Solaris?

[Fished]

Yeah, Solaris has some pretty awesome features, but at the end of the day all that may be irrelevant in the face of Market Pressures. Sun for many years shot themselves in the foot by failing to deliver useful tools for things like patching/updating, mass installation of Solaris servers (yes, there is jumpstart/wanboot, but it is clearly deficient), and failing to deliver a decent native volume manager (ZFS) until Too Late, and then not having it support root filesystems until Way Too Late.

The reality of Solaris is that there are all these features that look awesome in theory, until you actually have to implement them and discover the practical implications. Take Zones. Zone sounds great, in theory. But, ever tried to patch a server with zones? It's a nightmare. And heaven help you if you actually have a server with zones from multiple, different apps and you need to get outage windows from all the different app groups in order to patch. Or LDoms. Again, they sound awesome. That is, until you realize that there are no tools to manage migrations when a server goes down hard (the most common case for which you would want to do a migration!) So, you end up having to write a bunch of scripts to duplicate LDom xml files etc. to do this, because Sun/Oracle didn't really think through how their technology would be used in a real environment. I also use AIX virtualization technology, and it's much better, and VMWare (which is what we use for Linux servers) blows them both out of the water.

Things like this are why a lot of major companies, including the one I work at, are leaving Solaris as fast as they can. The reality is that it takes twice as many SA's per server on Solaris as it does for any other platform, we have lower virtualization densities, and it therefore costs a lot more money to run. For the kind of money we're talking about, we can deal with a few echoes in the interface for SAN's.