Re: KDTRACE is gone?

On Wed, 2006-11-22 at 11:57 -0500, Kris Kennaway wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 22, 2006 at 05:14:00AM +0000, John Birrell wrote:
> > On Tue, Nov 21, 2006 at 09:09:21PM -0800, Cai, Quanqing wrote:
> > > Today when I tried to compile my customized kernel, I run "config"
> > > command and got this: unknown option "KDTRACE".
> > > 
> > > Who can tell me what's going on?
> > 
> > The KDTRACE option can't work the way I intended it to because
> > of licensing restrictions.
> 
> By which John means that it could easily be included in FreeBSD under
> 'options KDTRACE' as before so that users could actually use DTRACE in
> FreeBSD.  However, it can't be included in GENERIC since the policy of
> FreeBSD is and always has been that GENERIC is a BSD-licensed kernel.
> With John's preferred change GENERIC would become under the CDDL.

I think this is a shame - having used DTrace under Solaris a fair bit,
it's great to know that it is always available.  Often, the times I find
I need it are exactly the times when I can't reboot to add it into the
kernel.

I haven't looked at the DTrace code at all - how much code does KDTRACE
add to the kernel?  Is it possible to write a specification for the code
and have somebody else write the kernel parts, like has been done with
GPL code in the past?

[ I'm not volunteering, I'm just asking if it _could_ be done ]

Gavin