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Comment by bbkane | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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...

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 :(

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