Oracle Continues With DTrace On Linux

Another noteworthy session from this year's Linux Foundation Summit was two Oracle engineers talking about DTrace on Linux.

Kris Van Hees and Elena Zannoni of Oracle were at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit to promote DTrace on Linux. Last year was when it was reported Oracle was bringing DTrace to Linux. In particular, they wanted to bring this Solaris technology from their Sun Microsystems acquisition over to their RHEL-derived Oracle Enterprise Linux.

Oracle has put out DTrace for the Linux kernel with user-space support. With this being the first Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit since they brought this technology from Solaris to Linux, it was a topic of this year's San Francisco event.

Oracle's reasoning for bringing DTrace to Linux is that there's been many Linux utilities available but with all different interfaces/outputs/commands, a lack of user-space tracing solutions, make DTrace Solaris scripts work on Linux, allow Solaris administrators to use their experience on Linux, and there's been reported customer demand.

Oracle makes DTrace on Linux available through their Oracle Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel (version 0.2 in UEK 2.6.39 kernel) and as a separate technology preview kernel. DTrace on Linux is limited to x86_64-only. Oracle's making all kernel changes under the GNU GPL while the DTrace kernel module itself is CDDL.

What's coming up next for DTrace on Linux is completing the profile provider, add more SDT providers, function boundary tracing, Compact Type Format support, and user-space application tracing.

For those not wishing to touch out-of-tree kernel solutions or anything potentially poisonous from Oracle, there is SystemTap as one open-source Linux alternative.