Seriously, it's about time...

unfortunately, it doesn't look like we'll get the full experience.

Some features are better than no features.

I hate that I can't use dtrace in Linux, and i haven't had the time to check out system tap yet.

So yeah, this is a good thing as far as I am concerned.

Does anyone know the status of Systemtap these days? Last time I checked it seemed to only work on Fedora, with hardly any documentation.

On a related note, I seriously doubt that playing license games gives Oracle any advantage at all. Single vendor, single distribution *nix projects have a tendency to wither, die, and get left behind.

Well, it is only pushed by RedHat (hence the adoption by Fedora only) so progress is slow. But steady I'd say. There are patch for a lots of server and SystemTap seems compatible with Dtrace entrypoints so I guess the thing now is to document it better.

A "state of the Union" document and good documentation and example would indeed be very welcome. It's a very promising and underestimated piece of technology. I'm really enthusiastic about it but I didn't take the time to study it yet.

I haven't studied it either, but for the curious the documentation is at http://sources.redhat.com/systemtap/documentation.html

systemtap adds a ton of complexity over dtrace. You can do more with it, but the really simple things that have large benefits are no longer really simple (which causes them to lose some of their benefit).

I've burned a lot of time trying to get it working on ubuntu -- one of my guys actually did by bringing over a fedora kernel. He said it wasn't easy.

I'm hoping Linux gets something like this in the mainline. I don't care of it's dtrace, systemtap, or something in between. This functionality is critical for both development and operation of production systems. Unfortunately, people don't seem to understand that until they have access to such a tool and realize they can answer all kinds of questions they never knew they could.