State of DTrace on FreeBSD

[George Neville-Neil]

On Jun 9, 2013, at 9:48 , Sevan / Venture37 <venture37 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Guys,
> I started off with wanting to run postgresql on FreeBSD with DTrace support enabled but ran into various problems, digging further I discovered that the issue is not specific to Postgreqsl.
> 
> My test system was FreeBSD-CURRENT/amd64 but I went back to 8.4/i386 to test.
> 
> On fresh 8.4 install it's not possible to build a kernel or world WITH_CTF=1, build fails with WITH_CTF & WITHOUT_CTF can't both be set
> On FreeBSD-CURRENT (r251249 from last Sunday), postgresql & firefox build --with-dtrace but probes never show up when running dtrace -l
> 
> On FreeBSD 9.1-STABLE (r250009) postgresql wouldn't build with dtrace support enabled.
> Failing with
> Assertion failed: (nrc == rc), function _libelf_resync_sections, file
> /usr/src/lib/libelf/elf_update.c, line 341.
> gmake: *** [utils/probes.o] Abort trap: 6 (core dumped)
> gmake: *** Deleting file 'utils/probes.o'
> *** [do-build] Error code 2
> 
> Previously reported here & http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-questions/2013-May/250843.html
> 
> I was wondering what the percieved state of DTrace support was from the developers perspective, is this known behaviour?
> Should I rais a PR to flag the postgresql port broken when attempting to build with dtrace support?

Please raise these bugs when you find them.  There are several of us now working to make sure
that DTrace on FreeBSD is at parity with DTrace in illumos, and that's a non trivial undertaking.

Best,
George