svn commit: r219107 - in stable/8/sys: amd64/amd64 amd64/include boot/common cddl/compat/opensolaris/kern cddl/compat/opensolaris/sys cddl/contrib/opensolaris/uts/common/dtrace cddl/contrib/opensol...

[Robert N. M. Watson]

On 1 Mar 2011, at 16:55, Ryan Stone wrote:

> I'm a bit confused.  The 8.2 release notes claim that userland dtrace
> support was added to 8.2.  Is this incorrect?
> 
> http://www.freebsd.org/releases/8.2R/relnotes.html
> 
> Userland support for the dtrace(1) subsystem has been added. This
> allows inspection of userland software itself and its correlation with
> the kernel, thus allowing a much better picture of what exactly is
> going on behind the scenes. The dtruss(1) utility has been added and
> libproc has been updated to support the facility.[r214983]

I think that's accurate but slightly misleading; the description of what is possible above was the case in 8.2, but there was a significant chunk of stuff not in 8.2 that I would also think of as part of userland dtrace. So dtruss(1) worked fine, but that relies on tracing of kernel bits, whereas the userland dtrace stuff I just MFC'd has to do with userspace components (such as applications, language runtimes, and so on) can expose their own probes, and be instrumented. So perhaps I should have said "even more userland DTrace", but realistically, this was a significant part of what most people would call userland DTrace.

Robert