O'Reilly European Open Source Convention - 17-20 October, 2005

Session
DTrace: Opening the Kimono
Adam Leventhal, Solaris Kernel Engineer, Sun Microsystems

Track: Linux
Date: Thursday, 20 October 2005
Time: 13:30 - 14:15
Location: St. John's Room II

DTrace is a novel facility in Solaris 10 that allows for the dynamic instrumentation of production systems. DTrace provides systemic observability from the lowest levels of them system to C, C++, Java, and php applications. Available to the public since November 2003, DTrace has since been used to find substantial opportunities for performance improvements in production environments -- often by finding glaring systemic problems that were invisible to other tools. Best of all, DTrace is now open source -- being the first component of Solaris to become so.

In this talk, one of the DTrace inventors will provide a quick overview of DTrace and its architecture, explain how DTrace can be used to assist other open source projects, and give some ideas for how DTrace itself can be improved by similarly motivated propeller-heads. The talk will also cover how DTrace has already been used by members of several open source communities for use in debugging and analyzing propblems, for including improved observability into dynamic languages and in porting DTrace to other operating systems.