Re: KDTRACE is gone?

2006/11/22, Gavin Atkinson <gavin.atkinson_at_ury.york.ac.uk>:
> 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 ]

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.

--Devon

> Gavin
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