freebsd announce - Jun 2010 - Foundation DTrace Userland Project Announcement

Dear FreeBSD Community,

We are pleased to announce that Rui Paulo has been awarded
a grant to add DTrace userland support to FreeBSD.

DTrace is a general purpose and lightweight tracing framework that
allows administrators, developers and users to investigate causes of
system failure or performance bottlenecks. The FreeBSD operating system
has had support for kernel-only DTrace since FreeBSD 8.0, but DTrace
userland support was missing. Having userland support in DTrace allows
inspection of userland software itself and its correlation with the
kernel, thus allowing a much better picture of what exactly is going on
behind the scenes.

This project will first concentrate on adding libproc support for symbol
to address mapping, address to symbol mapping, breakpoint setup and the
rtld interactions with DTrace. Next it will focus on DTrace process
control, importing the pid provider and adapting it to FreeBSD and
porting the userland statically defined probe provider (usdt). Finally
it will bring in the plockstat provider.

"By having userland DTrace support, companies can make their
products perform much better on FreeBSD due to the fact that they now
have access to this amazing tool," said FreeBSD developer Rui Paulo. He 
also said, "When we mix the userland support with
the kernel side DTrace support, we can also make FreeBSD a better
operating system because we can investigate performance bottlenecks much
easier."

The project should be completed by September 2010.

Sincerely,

The FreeBSD Foundation