KDTRACE is gone?

[Max Laier]

On Wednesday 22 November 2006 22:42, John Birrell wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 22, 2006 at 01:16:17PM -0500, Devon H. O'Dell wrote:
> > Yeah, it could be done. However, the DTrace provider (providing
> > BEGIN, END, and ERROR, and code that allows for other providers to
> > hook in) is > 13,000 lines of code and comments, so it'd be a very
> > non-trivial task.
>
> The DTrace provider isn't actually relevent to this discussion. That
> is find staying as a kernel module and CDDL'd.
>
> The issue is the hooks that the DTrace modules register with. These
> are very small bits of BSD licensed code that I write, and which
> get added inline to existing BSD licensed sources like trap.c. These
> little bits of code tend to require calling the DTrace kernel API or
> methods and techniques defined by CDDL headers and not documented
> anywhere else.

Did you try to ask Sun to relicense just the relevant headers for us?  
They seem to be very OpenSource friendly as of late and I can't see how 
it would hurt them.

> I have been very careful not to copy CDDL stuff into FreeBSD headers
> for fear of causing FreeBSD legal problems in future like the
> claims being made in the SCO vs IBM (Linux) litigation. Remember that
> the OpenSolaris source is based on System V and Sun Microsystems have
> extended it to include DTrace.

As far as I understand IBM's arguments in the case - and I am not a 
lawyer, so this might not mean much - they seem to belive that headers 
describing an API can't be easily protected by a license.

> I need to find an alternative to the KDTRACE implementation -- that's
> why I removed it for now.
>
> I want to come up with a functional equivalent to the Solaris DTrace
> implementation. Having it as an option (amongst a heap of other
> options) that a user /might/ choose to compile in, isn't a good
> design IMO.

-- 
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