Oracle Releases DTrace 2.0.0-1.14 For Linux Systems

DTrace used to be one of the Solaris features long sought after by Linux developers but over time the Linux kernel tracing capabilities have improved and Oracle has been supporting DTrace on Linux now for years without too much fanfare. DTrace 2.0.0-1.14 was released this past week as the latest iteration of this user-space implementation that builds off the Linux kernel tracing functionality like BPF.

It's been a decade now that Oracle has been working on DTrace for Linux albeit with time Linux's native tracing abilities have improved and with DTrace 2.0 now confined to just a standalone user-space application leveraging the kernel's native capabilities.

Bringing back the OpenSolaris memories from the Sun days...

With the new DTrace 2.0.0-1.14, the functionality is close to being "feature complete" compared to the prior DTrace for Linux 1.2 kernel-based implementation. The IO provider has been implemented, the print() action is in place, various other functions implemented, numerous bug fixes, and plenty of other changes. The Oracle release announcement reads:

We are happy to announce the availability of the latest development version of DTrace for Linux (2.0.0-1.14).

This new version is based on BPF and other Linux kernel tracing features and is implemented entirely as a userspace application. It can be used for tracing on any Linux kernel that provides BPF based tracing and BTF type data, although (as mentioned below) improved functionality depends on two (optional) kernel patches.

The functionality is close to being feature-complete in comparison with the kernel moduule based version of DTrace for Linux (version 1.2.1-1). Development continues in an incremental fashion to make the full feature set of DTrace available using existing kernel features.

The DTrace 2.0 code continues to be developed on GitHub.