Quote:
Originally Posted by vermaden
dtrace? ;p
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I think that it is really not possible to compare dtrace and systrace.
Dtrace is in very simplified terms a tool which enables you to monitor your system in real time for let say bottle necks and add hardware or relocate resources if needed.
Systrace was originally conceived as a very radical security tool which will enable you to do things like preventing applications from making certain system calls without explicit authorization from system admin in real time.
Ideally one would want to have both tools available on the system. The problem is that large parts of DTrace are patented and released under CDDL license or even more restrictive licenses so one would have to write loadable kernel modules. Obviously FreeBSD doesn't care much for licenses so they imported DTrace into kernel.
Systrace on the another hand is in some sense obsolete as there is a major security problem with the tool pointed by Dr. Rober Watson member of FreeBSD core team in one of his research papers. As the main developer of Systrace have parted ways
with OpenBSD project due to the disagreement with Theo de Raadt there has been no work on systrace in past 3-4 years. It is still part of the kernel of OpenBSD but has very specific uses which are not in line with original design goals of Systrace project. Systrace is probably fixable and there is some chance that OpenBSD will get DTrace in the form of loadable kernel modules. That would be really FANTASTIC!!!