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Date:      Wed, 22 Nov 2006 13:16:17 -0500
From:      "Devon H. O'Dell" <devon.odell@gmail.com>
To:        "Gavin Atkinson" <gavin.atkinson@ury.york.ac.uk>
Cc:        "Cai, Quanqing" <caiquanqing@gmail.com>, John Birrell <jb@what-creek.com>, freebsd-current@freebsd.org, Kris Kennaway <kris@obsecurity.org>
Subject:   Re: KDTRACE is gone?
Message-ID:  <9ab217670611221016q5bd1bf84v4ef878391eb2a67a@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <1164216949.18579.19.camel@buffy.york.ac.uk>
References:  <2b22951e0611212109t69b01400q5eb0ba15b028ce68@mail.gmail.com> <20061122051359.GA42639@what-creek.com> <20061122165735.GA37930@xor.obsecurity.org> <1164216949.18579.19.camel@buffy.york.ac.uk>

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2006/11/22, Gavin Atkinson <gavin.atkinson@ury.york.ac.uk>:
> On Wed, 2006-11-22 at 11:57 -0500, Kris Kennaway wrote:
> > On Wed, Nov 22, 2006 at 05:14:00AM +0000, John Birrell wrote:
> > > On Tue, Nov 21, 2006 at 09:09:21PM -0800, Cai, Quanqing wrote:
> > > > Today when I tried to compile my customized kernel, I run "config"
> > > > command and got this: unknown option "KDTRACE".
> > > >
> > > > Who can tell me what's going on?
> > >
> > > The KDTRACE option can't work the way I intended it to because
> > > of licensing restrictions.
> >
> > By which John means that it could easily be included in FreeBSD under
> > 'options KDTRACE' as before so that users could actually use DTRACE in
> > FreeBSD.  However, it can't be included in GENERIC since the policy of
> > FreeBSD is and always has been that GENERIC is a BSD-licensed kernel.
> > With John's preferred change GENERIC would become under the CDDL.
>
> I think this is a shame - having used DTrace under Solaris a fair bit,
> it's great to know that it is always available.  Often, the times I find
> I need it are exactly the times when I can't reboot to add it into the
> kernel.
>
> I haven't looked at the DTrace code at all - how much code does KDTRACE
> add to the kernel?  Is it possible to write a specification for the code
> and have somebody else write the kernel parts, like has been done with
> GPL code in the past?
>
> [ I'm not volunteering, I'm just asking if it _could_ be done ]

Yeah, it could be done. However, the DTrace provider (providing BEGIN,
END, and ERROR, and code that allows for other providers to hook in)
is > 13,000 lines of code and comments, so it'd be a very non-trivial
task.

--Devon

> Gavin
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