Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Thu, 23 Nov 2006 03:50:27 +0100
From:      Max Laier <max@love2party.net>
To:        freebsd-current@freebsd.org
Cc:        "Cai, Quanqing" <caiquanqing@gmail.com>, "Devon H. O'Dell" <devon.odell@gmail.com>, John Birrell <jb@what-creek.com>, Kris Kennaway <kris@obsecurity.org>
Subject:   Re: KDTRACE is gone?
Message-ID:  <200611230350.35351.max@love2party.net>
In-Reply-To: <20061122214203.GA48004@what-creek.com>
References:  <2b22951e0611212109t69b01400q5eb0ba15b028ce68@mail.gmail.com> <9ab217670611221016q5bd1bf84v4ef878391eb2a67a@mail.gmail.com> <20061122214203.GA48004@what-creek.com>

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
--nextPart3735824.iaKMFIVIY0
Content-Type: text/plain;
  charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
Content-Disposition: inline

On Wednesday 22 November 2006 22:42, John Birrell wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 22, 2006 at 01:16:17PM -0500, Devon H. O'Dell wrote:
> > 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.
>
> The DTrace provider isn't actually relevent to this discussion. That
> is find staying as a kernel module and CDDL'd.
>
> The issue is the hooks that the DTrace modules register with. These
> are very small bits of BSD licensed code that I write, and which
> get added inline to existing BSD licensed sources like trap.c. These
> little bits of code tend to require calling the DTrace kernel API or
> methods and techniques defined by CDDL headers and not documented
> anywhere else.

Did you try to ask Sun to relicense just the relevant headers for us? =20
They seem to be very OpenSource friendly as of late and I can't see how=20
it would hurt them.

> I have been very careful not to copy CDDL stuff into FreeBSD headers
> for fear of causing FreeBSD legal problems in future like the
> claims being made in the SCO vs IBM (Linux) litigation. Remember that
> the OpenSolaris source is based on System V and Sun Microsystems have
> extended it to include DTrace.

As far as I understand IBM's arguments in the case - and I am not a=20
lawyer, so this might not mean much - they seem to belive that headers=20
describing an API can't be easily protected by a license.

> I need to find an alternative to the KDTRACE implementation -- that's
> why I removed it for now.
>
> I want to come up with a functional equivalent to the Solaris DTrace
> implementation. Having it as an option (amongst a heap of other
> options) that a user /might/ choose to compile in, isn't a good
> design IMO.

=2D-=20
/"\  Best regards,                      | mlaier@freebsd.org
\ /  Max Laier                          | ICQ #67774661
 X   http://pf4freebsd.love2party.net/  | mlaier@EFnet
/ \  ASCII Ribbon Campaign              | Against HTML Mail and News

--nextPart3735824.iaKMFIVIY0
Content-Type: application/pgp-signature

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.5 (FreeBSD)

iD8DBQBFZQx7XyyEoT62BG0RAlIyAJ91hzgJf8yjvG/Myfud79BaDB/k3ACdHfi3
A2VnkoVuSSs/9a6faBnYo7I=
=HVod
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

--nextPart3735824.iaKMFIVIY0--



Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200611230350.35351.max>