macfidelity

Adam Leventhal wrote an interesting article in his blog about DTrace in Mac OS X 10.5.3

If you are interested in this topic you should really start with his earlier blog post first.

Links:

• Adam Leventhals blog
• Adams earlier article about DTrace in Mac OS X

Apple implemented DTrace into 10.5 Leopard which can be used to monitor applications and much more.

Sun as DTrace founder describes DTrace as:

DTrace is a comprehensive dynamic tracing framework for the Solaris Operating Environment. DTrace provides a powerful infrastructure to permit administrators, developers, and service personnel to concisely answer arbitrary questions about the behavior of the operating system and user programs.

Its pretty nice that we have this tool now in 10.5 but like always its not totally perfect=)

Adam Leventhal explains the limitations of Apples DTrace in his blog

Quote:

So Apple is explicitly preventing DTrace from examining or recording data for processes which don’t permit tracing. This is antithetical to the notion of systemic tracing, antithetical to the goals of DTrace, and antithetical to the spirit of open source. I’m sure this was inserted under pressure from ISVs, but that makes the pill no easier to swallow. To say that Apple has crippled DTrace on Mac OS X would be a bit alarmist, but they’ve certainly undermined its efficacy and, in doing do, unintentionally damaged some of its most basic functionality. To users of Mac OS X and of DTrace: Apple has done a service by porting DTrace, but let’s convince them to go one step further and port it properly.

Links:

• My last blog-entry regarding DTrace
• German ::: heise.de about apple and DTrace

Check this Google Mac Blog entry about DTrace

Edit:

Article itself was published on mactech.com and written by Greg Miller