Although Sun's OpenSolaris plan, OpenSolaris.org Web site and community advisory board have been unveiled, indications are that the full source code for Solaris 10 will be available only in the second quarter of 2005.
Sun had planned to launch OpenSolaris in November 2004, but company executives said the process was delayed by licensing discussions.
OpenSolaris is to be released under the Common Development and Distribution Licence (CDDL), which precludes programmers from mixing Solaris and Linux software. Unlike the General Public Licence, software governed by the CDDL may be mixed with proprietary software without requiring that software be released as open source.
Sun says as an indication of its commitment to the CDDL, the source code for DTrace has been made available under the licence.
DTrace was developed after Sun engineers realised they were not tackling the right problems.
"We felt we were spending a lot of time solving problems users were not having because the performance problems being simulated in the development labs were not the same as problems being experienced in production environments," says Bryan Cantrill, senior staff engineer at Sun.
"If you view the objective as getting to work by car, we were concentrating on fine-tuning the engine, but the real problem was the bad road," says Cantrill. "Once we realised this, we decided to build the tools that would discover the bad road."
An alternative approach
DTrace represents an alternative approach to the single application focus of other developer tools.
"You need a novel approach to dynamically instrument the entire system, weaving together a running kernel and running applications and get a comprehensive picture of what is going on in the system, which is what DTrace does," explains Cantrill.
"DTrace provides a view of the entire Solaris operating system, revealing system problems that were previously invisible and fixing performance problems previously impossible to identify," says Cantrill. "The symptoms of production system problems are often so removed from the real problem that before DTrace there was no chance of finding the root cause."
Sun says DTrace has delivered up to 60% performance improvements in testing, but no statistics are available yet for performance gains in local implementations of Solaris 10.
DTrace is designed to help system administrators to interrogate things like disk utilisation to give meaningful information. "There are over 30 000 touchpoints in an application you can look at in minutes, which couldn't be done before," says Tarun Pranjivan, Sun SA technology officer.
"Performance problems can be understood on production machines, bottlenecks can be identified and fixed in hours or minutes instead of days, and service availability can be improved," says Pranjivan.
"The great thing about being the first to build this kind of fault-tracing technology is that we are getting to trip over all the rocks. There is stuff hiding everywhere because there is a lot of bad software out there," says Cantrill.
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