NationMaster - Encyclopedia: DTrace

DTrace is a comprehensive dynamic tracing framework created by Sun Microsystems. It was released under the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) in January 2005 and included in Sun's Solaris 10 for troubleshooting system problems in real time. DTrace was the first component of the OpenSolaris project to be released under the CDDL. â€œSoftware developmentâ€ redirects here. ... Sun Microsystems, Inc. ... An operating system (OS) is the software that manages the sharing of the resources of a computer and provides programmers with an interface used to access those resources. ... Diagram of the relationships between several Unix-like systems A Unix-like operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, while not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification. ... Computer software can be organized into categories based on common function, type, or field of use. ... In software engineering, tracing is a specialized use of logging to record information about about a programs execution. ... A software license is a legal agreement which may take the form of a proprietary or gratuitous license as well as a memorandum of contract between a producer and a user of computer software. ... Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) is an open source and Free software license, produced by Sun Microsystems, based on the Mozilla Public License (MPL), version 1. ... A website (alternatively, Web site or web site) is a collection of Web pages, images, videos or other digital assets that is hosted on one or several Web server(s), usually accessible via the Internet, cell phone or a LAN. A Web page is a document, typically written in HTML... In software engineering, tracing is a specialized use of logging to record information about about a programs execution. ... Sun Microsystems, Inc. ... Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) is an open source and Free software license, produced by Sun Microsystems, based on the Mozilla Public License (MPL), version 1. ... Year 2005 (MMV) was a common year starting on Saturday (link displays full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ... Solaris is a computer operating system developed by Sun Microsystems. ... Troubleshooting is a form of problem solving. ... OpenSolaris is an open source project created by Sun Microsystems to build a developer community around Solaris Operating System technology. ...

DTrace is designed to give operational insights that allow users to tune and troubleshoot applications and the OS itself. Special consideration has been taken to make it safe to use in a production environment. For example, there is minimal probe effect when tracing is underway, and no performance impact associated with any disabled probe; this is important since there are tens of thousands of DTrace probes that can be enabled. Heisenberg uncertainty principle applied to computer software. ...

Tracing programs (also referred to as scripts) can be written using the D programming language (not to be confused with other programming languages named "D"). The language is a subset of C with added functions and variables specific to tracing. D programs most resemble awk programs in structure; they consist of a set of actions rather than a top-down structured program. In a DTrace program, one or more probes (instrumentation points) are enabled; whenever the condition for the probe is met (the probe "fires"), the action associated with the probe in the DTrace program is executed. Ð, Unicode codepoint 208, U+00D0 is: Ð, a letter used in Old English and present-day Icelandic and Faroese. ... C is a general-purpose, block structured, procedural, imperative computer programming language developed in 1972 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system. ... AWK is a general purpose computer language that is designed for processing text-based data, either in files or data streams. ... Top-down and Bottom-up are approaches to the software development process, and by extension to other procedures, mostly involving software. ...

DTrace was designed and implemented by Bryan Cantrill, Mike Shapiro, and Adam Leventhal. The authors received recognition in 2005 for the innovations in DTrace from InfoWorld and Technology Review.^[1]^[2] DTrace won the top prize in the Wall Street Journal's 2006 Technology Innovation Awards competition.^[3] Bryan Cantrill, is an engineer at Sun Microsystems. ... InfoWorld is an information technology online media and events business operating under the umbrella of InfoWorld Media Group, a division of IDG (International Data Group). ... Technology Review is an innovation and technology magazine affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. ... The Wall Street Journal is an influential international daily newspaper published in New York City, New York with an average daily circulation of 1,800,607 (2002). ... Year 2006 (MMVI) was a common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ...

DTrace implementations require tight integration with the operating system kernel. Although DTrace was initially written for Solaris, its source code is freely available as part of the OpenSolaris project, and work is in progress to port it to FreeBSD (in which there has been initial success^[4] as a substitute for the ktrace utility) and QNX ^[5]. Apple has included DTrace in Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard" with GUI Instruments.^[6] A kernel connects the application software to the hardware of a computer. ... FreeBSD is a Unix-like free operating system descended from AT&T UNIX via the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) branch through the 386BSD and 4. ... QNX (pronounced either Q-N-X or Q-nix) is a commercial POSIX-compliant Unix-like real-time operating system, aimed primarily at the embedded systems market. ... Mac OS X v10. ... Instruments is an application performance analyzer and visualizer, integrated in Xcode 3. ...

References

ACM Queue is a computer magazine published by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). ... A digital object identifier (or DOI) is a standard for persistently identifying a piece of intellectual property on a digital network and associating it with related data, the metadata, in a structured extensible way. ... ISSN, or International Standard Serial Number, is the unique eight-digit number applied to a periodical publication including electronic serials. ... Year 2006 (MMVI) was a common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ... is the 251st day of the year (252nd in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... The USENIX Association is the Advanced Computing Technical Association. ... Year 2006 (MMVI) was a common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ... is the 251st day of the year (252nd in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ...

Notes

^ Tracing software in real time. Technology Review. MIT (2005). Retrieved on 2007-03-31.
^ McAllister, Neil (August 2005). Innovation is alive and well in 2005. InfoWorld. IDG. Retrieved on 2007-03-31.
^ Totty, Michael (September 2006). The Winners Are.... The Wall Street Journal. Dow Jones & Company, Inc.. Retrieved on 2007-03-31.
^ LeMay, Renai (2006-05-29). DTrace reaches prime time on FreeBSD. ZDNet Australia. Retrieved on 2007-04-15.
^ I trace, you trace … what about dtrace?. QNX blog. Retrieved on 2007-11-08.
^ Mac OS X Leopard - Developer Tools - Instruments. Apple, Inc. Retrieved on 2007-10-19.

Year 2007 (MMVII) is the current year, a common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar and the AD/CE era in the 21st century. ... is the 90th day of the year (91st in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 2007 (MMVII) is the current year, a common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar and the AD/CE era in the 21st century. ... is the 90th day of the year (91st in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 2007 (MMVII) is the current year, a common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar and the AD/CE era in the 21st century. ... is the 90th day of the year (91st in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 2006 (MMVI) was a common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ... is the 149th day of the year (150th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 2007 (MMVII) is the current year, a common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar and the AD/CE era in the 21st century. ... is the 105th day of the year (106th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 2007 (MMVII) is the current year, a common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar and the AD/CE era in the 21st century. ... is the 312th day of the year (313th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Apple Inc. ... Year 2007 (MMVII) is the current year, a common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar and the AD/CE era in the 21st century. ... is the 292nd day of the year (293rd in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ...

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