Linux Performance Analysis and Tools
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Linux Performance Analysis and Tools
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Re: Linux Performance Analysis and Tools
#2Awesome talk, though the SystemTap coverage was oddly weak.
Saying 'SystemTap was was created when there weren't Solaris for Linux ports' is a little disingenuous. Linux had live kernel instrumentation with kprobes way before Sun debuted DTrace, and DTrace was deliberately licensed in a way to be incompatible with the Linux kernel.
If you want to see some actual useful production taps you can use right now on your Red Hat / CentOS box, check out http://sourceware.org/systemtap/wiki/WarStories
Re: Linux Performance Analysis and Tools
#3Awesome talk, though the SystemTap coverage was oddly weak. Saying 'SystemTap was was created when there weren't Solaris for Linux ports' is a little disingenuous. Linux had live kernel instrumentation with kprobes way before Sun debuted DTrace, and DTrace was deliberately licensed in a way to be incompatible with the Linux kernel. If you want to see some actual useful production taps you can use right now on your Re…
DTrace was deliberately licensed in a way to be incompatible with the Linux kernel.
This was commented on directly by Bryan Cantrill on HN [1]. You should also watch his "Fork Yeah!" [2] and "Corporate Open Source Anti-Patterns" [3] talks for full context.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4357507
Re: Linux Performance Analysis and Tools
#4Awesome talk, though the SystemTap coverage was oddly weak. Saying 'SystemTap was was created when there weren't Solaris for Linux ports' is a little disingenuous. Linux had live kernel instrumentation with kprobes way before Sun debuted DTrace, and DTrace was deliberately licensed in a way to be incompatible with the Linux kernel. If you want to see some actual useful production taps you can use right now on your Re…
DTrace was deliberately licensed in a way to be incompatible with the Linux kernel. This was commented on directly by Bryan Cantrill on HN [1]. You should also watch his "Fork Yeah!" [2] and "Corporate Open Source Anti-Patterns" [3] talks for full context. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4357507 [2]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc [3]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhgXQFk9noI
Great links.
Re: Linux Performance Analysis and Tools
#5Awesome talk, though the SystemTap coverage was oddly weak. Saying 'SystemTap was was created when there weren't Solaris for Linux ports' is a little disingenuous. Linux had live kernel instrumentation with kprobes way before Sun debuted DTrace, and DTrace was deliberately licensed in a way to be incompatible with the Linux kernel. If you want to see some actual useful production taps you can use right now on your Re…
DTrace was deliberately licensed in a way to be incompatible with the Linux kernel. This was commented on directly by Bryan Cantrill on HN [1]. You should also watch his "Fork Yeah!" [2] and "Corporate Open Source Anti-Patterns" [3] talks for full context. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4357507 [2]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc [3]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhgXQFk9noI
I want to point out a comment [1] apparently by the former chief open source evangelist, Danese Cooper [2], on the "Fork Yeah!" video contradicting Bryan Cantrill on this point. Here it is reproduced:
Lovely except it really was decided to explicitly make OpenSolaris incompatible with GPL. That was one of the design points of the CDDL. I was in that room, Bryan and you were not, but I know its fun to re-write history to suit your current politics. I pleaded with Sun to use a BSD family license or the GPL itself and they would consider neither because that would have allowed D-Trace to end up in Linux. You can claim otherwise all you want...this was the truth in 2005
[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&lc=UEj5uH4rMafUnX... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danese_Cooper
Re: Linux Performance Analysis and Tools
#6I recently dove into this area in an attempt to find something like strace that didn't cost as much (as the slides mention, it's hundreds of times slower to run something under strace). It seems like dtrace can likely do what I want, but it doesn't sound reliable under linux yet. Does anyone know if the native linux profiling tools can be used to answer questions like "which files is my process accessing"?
As far as I found, various tools can trace syscalls and count them, but the critical thing strace adds is that it decodes the pointer parameters to syscalls into strings, something that e.g. "perf trace" doesn't seem to do.
Re: Linux Performance Analysis and Tools
#7Earlier quoted context omitted.
DTrace was deliberately licensed in a way to be incompatible with the Linux kernel. This was commented on directly by Bryan Cantrill on HN [1]. You should also watch his "Fork Yeah!" [2] and "Corporate Open Source Anti-Patterns" [3] talks for full context. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4357507 [2]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc [3]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhgXQFk9noI
I want to point out a comment [1] apparently by the former chief open source evangelist, Danese Cooper [2], on the "Fork Yeah!" video contradicting Bryan Cantrill on this point. Here it is reproduced: Lovely except it really was decided to explicitly make OpenSolaris incompatible with GPL. That was one of the design points of the CDDL. I was in that room, Bryan and you were not, but I know its fun to re-write history…
I fully trust in Danese's description of the events in this case.
Not only because she (Danese) was the person who actually created the licence (and thus is the best authority on the prerequisites set by the Sun management), but also because it makes perfect sense.
Sun, a company whose Solaris product was suffering greatly under competition from Linux, would NOT want to offer up their systems technical advantages under a open source licence which would allow Linux to use said technical advantages. It seems purely logical to me.
Listening further to Danese, she describes the Sun management as wanting a copyleft style licence for the code, and that they were eyeing GPLv3, but not GPLv2 which was already available (again, GPLv3 code would not be compatible with the Linux kernel, while GPLv2 obviously would), however GPLv3 was taking to long to be finalized so they set her (Danese) on the task of creating a new licence.
Re: Linux Performance Analysis and Tools
#8I recently dove into this area in an attempt to find something like strace that didn't cost as much (as the slides mention, it's hundreds of times slower to run something under strace). It seems like dtrace can likely do what I want, but it doesn't sound reliable under linux yet. Does anyone know if the native linux profiling tools can be used to answer questions like "which files is my process accessing"? As far as…
Try lsof for files accessed by process.
Re: Linux Performance Analysis and Tools
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
DTrace was deliberately licensed in a way to be incompatible with the Linux kernel. This was commented on directly by Bryan Cantrill on HN [1]. You should also watch his "Fork Yeah!" [2] and "Corporate Open Source Anti-Patterns" [3] talks for full context. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4357507 [2]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc [3]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhgXQFk9noI
I want to point out a comment [1] apparently by the former chief open source evangelist, Danese Cooper [2], on the "Fork Yeah!" video contradicting Bryan Cantrill on this point. Here it is reproduced: Lovely except it really was decided to explicitly make OpenSolaris incompatible with GPL. That was one of the design points of the CDDL. I was in that room, Bryan and you were not, but I know its fun to re-write history…
> Lovely except it really was decided to explicitly make OpenSolaris incompatible with GPL.
In fairness to both sides, pretty much everything that isn't GPL can be said to be incompatible with GPL, and almost anyone who decides to use something different than the GPL can be said to be deliberately incompatible with the GPL. That's just the nature of the GPL.
Re: Linux Performance Analysis and Tools
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
I want to point out a comment [1] apparently by the former chief open source evangelist, Danese Cooper [2], on the "Fork Yeah!" video contradicting Bryan Cantrill on this point. Here it is reproduced: Lovely except it really was decided to explicitly make OpenSolaris incompatible with GPL. That was one of the design points of the CDDL. I was in that room, Bryan and you were not, but I know its fun to re-write history…
I fully trust in Danese's description of the events in this case. Not only because she (Danese) was the person who actually created the licence (and thus is the best authority on the prerequisites set by the Sun management), but also because it makes perfect sense. Sun, a company whose Solaris product was suffering greatly under competition from Linux, would NOT want to offer up their systems technical advantages und…
I've recently been using DTrace on Ubuntu. I filed two bugs on the project page (https://github.com/dtrace4linux/linux), and Paul Fox fixed them quickly. I have more bugs to file, but I'm doing my part in making DTrace on Linux a reality.
It's very tempting to join these licensing discussions (I was at Sun, too, and many of us DID want to see DTrace on Linux), but I think that's a distraction from what's happening right now.
There are two projects porting DTrace to Linux, which is really exciting. I'm helping out.