[erlang-questions] Introducing new work on adding DTrace probes to the Erlang VM

[Scott Lystig Fritchie]

Good evening.  If you hadn't read the tweet that I'd made last week,
I've started work on introducing DTrace probes to the Erlang VM.

Some DTrace work was done on the R12 Erlang runtime by Garry Bulmer
and Tim Watson.  If anyone out there knows how to contact either of
them, please contact me.  Much of their work has been lost (at least
to me) in the mists of time.

The work is on a branch called "dtrace-experiment" over on GitHub, see
https://github.com/slfritchie/otp/tree/dtrace-experiment and then scroll
down far enough so that you can see the README text.  The branch was
created off of the "dev" branch from the Ericsson OTP repo on 23 August.

Code contributions are welcome!  This is a side project for me (SLF),
so things would go faster if other people are willing to pitch in.
Please use the GitHub pull request mechanism or send me an email
message.

At the moment, the only thing that has had probes added thoroughly is
the efile_drv driver.  (There are some toy probes for erlang:spawn(),
but it was just a proof-of-concept toy.)  But that's a big chunk of
code.  According to "diff", I've removed about 400 lines of text and
added about 1,400 lines.

    % /path/to/debug-build/bin/erl +A 6
    Erlang R14B04 (erts-5.8.5) [source] [64-bit] [smp:8:8] [rq:8] \
        [async-threads:6] [hipe] [kernel-poll:false] [type-assertions] \
        [debug-compiled] [lock-checking] [dtrace]
    
    Eshell V5.8.5  (abort with ^G)
    1> 

Happy hacking!

-Scott