dtrace

Article summary

DTrace is a comprehensive dynamic tracing framework originally created by Sun Microsystems for troubleshooting kernel and application problems on production systems in real time. Originally developed for Solaris, it has since been released under the free Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) in OpenSolaris and its descendant illumos, and has been ported to several other Unix-like systems. Windows Server systems from Windows Server 2025 will have DTrace as part of the system. DTrace can be used to get a global overview of a running system, such as the amount of memory, CPU time, filesystem and network resources used by the active processes. It can also provide much more fine-grained information, such as a log of the arguments with which a specific function is being called, or a list of the processes accessing a specific file. In 2010, Oracle Corporation acquired Sun Microsystems and announced the discontinuation of OpenSolaris. As a community effort of some core Solaris engineers to create a truly open source Solaris, illumos operating system was announced via webinar on Thursday, 3 August 2010, as a fork on OpenSolaris OS/Net consolidation, including DTrace technology. In October 2011, Oracle announced the porting of DTrace to Linux, and in 2019 official DTrace for Fedora is available on GitHub.…

Key claims

No claims recorded.

Discussion questions

1. Summarise the article in your own words. Which single claim would you verify first, and why?
2. Which claim in this article is most likely to be revised as the sources update? How would you check its current status?
3. If two sources disagreed about one of these facts, what would you need in order to trust one over the other?

Bibliography

No sources recorded.