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Comment by littlestymaar | Hacker News Reader

I saw your comment[1] after I wrote mine, but I'm not saying that he's forcing you guys to use it (that would not a good way of being a CTO at a start-up…), but that doesn't prevent him from advocating for solutions he believes in.

Would you say that Oxide would have chosen Illumos if he wasn't part of the company?

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39180706

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> Would you say that Oxide would have chosen Illumos if he wasn't part of the company?

I don't know how to respond to this question, because to me it reads like "if things were completely different, what would they be like?" I have no idea if you could even argue that a company could be the same company with different founders.

What I can say is that this line of questioning still makes me feel like you're implying that this choice was made simply based on preference. It was not. I am employee #17 at Oxide, and the decision still wasn't made by the time I joined. But again, the choice was made based on a number of technical factors. The RFD wasn't even authored by Bryan, but instead by four other folks at Oxide. We all (well, everyone who wanted to, I say "we" because I in fact did) wrote out the pros and cons of both, and we weighed it like we would weigh any technical decision: that is, not as a battle of sports teams, but as a "hey we need to drive some screws: should we use a screwdriver, a hammer, or something else?" sort of nuts-and-bolts engineering decision.

> we weighed it like we would weigh any technical decision: that is, not as a battle of sports teams, but as a "hey we need to drive some screws: should we use a screwdriver, a hammer, or something else?" sort of nuts-and-bolts engineering decision.

I'm not saying otherwise.

In fact, when I wrote my original comment, I actually rewrote it multiple time to be sure it wouldn't suggest I was thinking it was some sort of irrational decision (that's why I added the “it's a good fit for what they are doing”), but given your reaction it looks like I failed. Written language is hard, especially in a foreign language, sorry about that.

It's all good! I re-wrote what I wrote multiple times as well. Communication is hard. I appreciate you taking the effort, sorry to have misunderstood.

Heck, there's a great little mistake of communication in the title: this isn't just "intended" to power the rack, it does power the rack! But they said that because we said that in the README, because that line in the README was written before it ended up happening. Oops!

(I work at Oxide.)

Bryan is just one out of several illumos experts here. If none of those were around, sure, maybe we wouldn't have picked illumos -- but then we'd be unrecognizably different.

I came into Oxide with a Linux background and zero knowledge of illumos. Learning about DTrace especially has been great.

I'd like to learn DTrace (especially after the recent 20yr podcast episode), but I worry it'll never make into mainstream Linux debugging, and hence only useful for more niche jobs.

Your concern is completely reasonable -- a thing I'd add though is that both Windows and macOS have DTrace support.

I was excited, but it looks like both MacOS and Windows require special admin permissions for my laptop that I doubt my work would approve (completely reasonable to require this, it just makes it unusable for me).

It's actually not reasonable to require this if you do it right. On Solaris and illumos DTrace works just fine for a normal user. You simply have access to fewer probes if you are less privileged.

Not the case on FreeBSD/Windows/macOS, where it's all or nothing. Still, on FreeBSD you just need root, on macOS you need to boot into a special kernel mode which doesn't even work on modern Apple Silicon machines.

DTrace in macOS was always a third class citizen, it never worked very well, and in fact, on arm64 machines it doesn't work at all (panics the kernel).

That's really unfortunate :(

Linux now has eBPF, which is essentially a VM running inside the Linux kernel. You can run your own programs on this little VM and extend the kernel to a staggering degree. Some clever folks have used this to build open source tracing tools that rival and even surpass Dtrace in some ways. Brendan Gregg, a Dtrace wizard and old colleague of some of the Oxide team back at Sun and Joyent, has some great resources on the subject

https://www.brendangregg.com/ebpf.html

https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2018-10-08/dtrace-for-linu...

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