01.23.2005 00:19

Sun open sourcing DTrace Tues, OpenSolaris.org site live Tues


Up on Newsforge today: Sun to announce open source DTrace on Tuesday, referencing the Computer Reseller News leak, that this coming Tuesday, Sun Microsystems is releasing the source code for its DTrace utility.

This is outstanding news. Sun's DTrace allows admins to diagnose running systems in real time, scripting the utility's 30,000 data monitoring points to show information on disk I/O activity, file opens, disk accesses, disk head seek distance by process, process activity snooping (by UID, for example), live reporting on shell input and output, printing keystroke activity in inbound ssh sessions, snooping inbound TCP connections, setuid calls and lots of other cool stuff. This is detailed drilling down that used to take hours pouring over output without any certainty you'd be able to pinpoint what's causing problems.

The BigAdmin DTrace page is here. The usenet announcement was Introducing DTrace by Bryan Cantrill, a year ago November.

You know awk, you can whip up DTrace scripts.

OpenSolaris.org will be a community news, discussion and support site.

It looks as if Sun will be open sourcing Trusted Containers and the Zettabyte (self-repairing for data integrity and pooled partitions re-sizeable on the fly) File System later this year.