Dtrace OSCON session
August 4, 2005 2 Comments
I'm in a session on Dtrace, being given by Bryan Cantrill, who is one of the Dtrace authors. I have to say that Dtrace is really nice. Someone needs to implement this for Linux – it's really useful. DProbes was the closest thing I could find for Linux, and it's not even in the same ballpark. This tool really has the ability to save you tons of time when debugging system performance problems.
–jeremy
OSCON, OSCON05, OSCON2005, Dtrace
Jeremy's Blog 
I have good news and bad news for you.
The closed thing to dtrace in Linux is Systemtap its a cheap copy and hack, its designed with none of the safety of dtrace, so you may be able to debug a problem in a non-production system, but it's still very limited in what it can do. Make a mistake or even find your bug you are looking for and you will most likely crash the system.
Systemtrap still has no support for userland probes and the total amount of probes you can enable are limited to a few hundred. No support for adding 1,000's or more of probes.
Thanks for the feedback.
–jeremy