Comment by Analemma_
8 years ago
Different risk assessments. DTrace is a non-critical tool, and a totally standalone one. If it suddenly had to be yanked out of macOS because of licensing issues, there would be gnashing of teeth but life would ultimately go on. The filesystem is a different story: if something happened and it had to be immediately removed, Apple would be up shit creek.
Yep, this was more or less exactly how the conversation went.
What about this? Does this change anything?
https://gnu.wildebeest.org/blog/mjw/2018/02/14/dtrace-for-li...
No, for a lot of reasons:
1) AFAICT they didn't relicense any of the ZFS code, just dtrace.
2) Even if they had, GPLv2 code still wouldn't be able to go into xnu.
3) Even if it could, Apple has long since moved on from ZFS. They've taken the time to write a new filesystem (APFS) already, so it's hard to see them having any interest in ZFS at this point (and yes, I know APFS doesn't have all the features of ZFS).
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It's not totally standalone (it has kernel components, for example), but yes, it's clearly something far easier to suddenly drop.
I think the point is you can rip the kernel components out, and the (non-Dtrace using dev) user doesn't notice. Whereas removing a filesystem driver leaves users without their data.
Mojave drops support for DTrace probes in Instruments, so this process may already have begun.
Very few people internally to Apple cared about DTrace, and the person who was primarily responsible for evangelizing it left that particular role years ago. DTrace support has been slowly degrading over time (to the point that Apple has ended up shipping DTrace scripts on the system that do nothing but spew errors if you try and use them, as the probes changed and nobody updated the scripts).
It's a shame, because DTrace is cool and very powerful, but it seems almost nobody bothered to actually learn how to use it or cared about supporting it.
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Really? Is there a replacement?
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Doesn't instruments and activity monitor build on top of Dtrace in MacOS? Which if true doesn't seem so easy to rip out.
You're still comparing, at most, a handful of applications that would need to be removed or updated vs. an entire filesystem that everything is built upon.
Sure certainly less effort, I guess I was responding to the previous poster saying Dtrace was a "standalone" program, because other programs build on top of it.