making use of userland dtrace on FreeBSD

Alfred Perlstein alfred at ixsystems.com
Fri Dec 21 17:36:01 UTC 2012


Hey folks,

We have had userland dtrace for a while now.  However it's not really 
hooked up into the build, nor as far as I can tell are ports nor shared 
libs.

Dtrace can be immensely useful for tracking down hard to find bugs, 
memory leaks, performance problems and a lot more.

What are the thoughts on making this available by default on FreeBSD 
going forward?

What would need to happen?

Supposedly we can do this by just adding 
"CFLAGS=-fno-omit-frame-pointer" and not completely stripping installed 
tools/libraries.

Would it make sense to set this as default for the whole system? Just 
libs+ports?  Or do people think that the performance gain of 
omit-frame-pointer (which I am unsure of) is worth the loss of 
debug-ability (like a certain arctic bird based OS)?

I have also factored in the size of binaries into this, and I really am 
not sure why it would be a problem other than if we didn't offer an 
"easy button" to make things "small".

Let's figure this out, because it seems to me that we should be offering 
this to our users if possible.

-Alfred


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