DTrace for Developers: no more printfs

One of the largest challenges to building complex software is a lack of run time visibility into what the system is doing at any particular time. Typical approaches to adding tracing and logging emphasize sprinkling calls to printf() or similar statements throughout the source code, and enabling these in debug builds. DTrace is a modern system that gives software developers the ability to add, low overhead tracing that is always available, coupled with an advanced scripting language, to programs that they are creating, modifying and debugging.

In this tutorial we will cover the basics of DTrace, including basic and advanced uses, and then, using a set of worked examples, add tracing to user space and kernel space systems. The tutorial includes a set of short labs, carried out on virtual machines, that give the students hands on experience working with DTrace.

Students are expected to have a laptop computer which can run Virtual Machine software such as VMWare (preferred), Virtual Box or QEMU.