Notes for October 13 2016

markj@ says he will try to MFC the anonymous tracing work to FreeBSD 10

gnn@ has committed the varargs fix to HEAD and is testing a merge to 11

gnn@ will set up HEAD so that the DTrace test suite is built by default and that the currently few failing tests are marked that way

Samuel has found some race conditions in DTrace but these seem related more to Mac OS than the base code.

Arun has blocking DTrace on FreeBSD on his TODO list.

Samuel asks if FreeBSD can use DTrace to start non-root processes. Mac OS has a “-W” on their DTrace that waits for a specific process to start. gnn@ will look into the source base for this option.

Arun has finalized his DTrace Internals talk and sent the slides off to the organizers of EuroBSDCon. We will also create a docs repo in OpenDTrace for this presentation and others.

markj@ has code for zero cost probes for SDT but has found that though it is better than the current implementation it is not so much better that he's rushing to put it into the tree. It will go in eventually though. There are problems with making this work on non-Solaris systems because Solaris had a relocatable kernel but the rest of the OS's do not. Mac OS does this with special naming. The Mac OS changes are in the OS code drops which are now in OpenDTrace and markj@ will go take a look at that as well. What we'd like is an LLVM intrinsic that handles making a bit in the code patchable.

Meeting for dinner on the 10th November is now planned.