Todd Walton wrote:
I read this article because it said "DTrace", and what I got was the psychologizing. What do you guys think of this? The blogger says, "Why aren't the Linux people porting DTrace?". I thought the reason was licensing issues. Legal incompatibility. He didn't say anything about that, but rather suggested that kernel developers:
Well, I find the Linux "License Whiners" particularly annoying because Linus went out of his way to choose the GPL (which chooses to be incompatible with certain things itself) and then modified the GPL such that it is even incompatible with later GPL's.
Pot, kettle, black.
1) see Sun as the enemy 2) [are] still reacting to SCO by pretending that Linux isn't Unix and they're a copy-nothing shop 3) don't have IBM's cheerful certainty that the customer won't know where the ideas came from 4) didn't invent it 5) all of the above
I would argue that the main obstruction is Linus' attitude about kernel API's.
First, Linus' has a bit of "working on the kernel *should* be difficult to keep out the riff-raff." This is somewhat obvious in his attitude toward not having a kernel debugger when every other operating system on the planet does.
Second, there is his attitude toward kernel API's. To have a good tracing system, your API's have to have a bit of stability. People who use these facilities expect that there will be changes, but if you blow away their scripts on every kernel revision, they will quit using the facility.
Third, is there an itch? The people who would most use this facility are probably some of the highest end developers that exist. They really only need this once the *kernel* is your performance problem. If they really need it, they probably can absorb a move to Solaris without even thinking about it. So, the people who would use it most are really the kernel developers, and we refer back to Linus' kernel machismo.
And I suspect that "industry standard" is a little strong when describing DTrace. But what do I know?
Well, that's true. I would use "industry leading" as the marketing term, personally. ;)
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