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HEADS-UP Initial DTrace port added to current



Courtesy of CoyotePoint Systems, I've committed a port of DTrace (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DTrace ) to NetBSD current for i386. The port is based on the FreeBSD-8 port. DTrace is a dynamic tracing framework developed by Sun. It enables the instrumentation of the kernel and user space and provides powerful debugging and inspection options via tracing scripts. See http://wikis.sun.com/display/DTrace/Introduction for an introduction.

See http://wiki.netbsd.se/How_to_enable_and_run_DTrace for details on trying out a hello world script.

At the moment the DTrace kernel module builds and loads, and its able to execute a basic hello world D script using the built-in BEGIN/END provider. It still needs work to support kernel modules, user- space tracing (via libproc), providers (fbt, sdt, systrace, profiler, lockstat, etc), and a few other bit and pieces marked with "XXX TBD"comments in the code. It doesn't do much at the moment but once providers are completed DTrace will enable interesting views into the kernel for inspection and profiling, and debugging. It may be a bit unstable - please let me know if you run into any problems trying it out.

I'm working on an SDT provider as an example provider and should have that committed next week.

Regards,
Darran.


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