The real, mythical DTrace comes to Gentoo! Need to dynamically trace your kernel or userspace programs, with rainbows, ponies, and unicorns - and all entirely safely and in production?! Gentoo is now ready for that! Just emerge dev-debug/dtrace and you’re all set. All required kernel options are already enabled in the newest stable Gentoo distribution kernel; if you are compiling manually, the DTrace ebuild will inform you about required configuration changes. Internally, DTrace 2.0 for Linux builds on the BPF engine of the Linux kernel, so don’t be surprised if the awesome cross-compilation features of Gentoo are used to install a gcc that outputs BPF code (which, btw, also comes in very handy for sys-apps/systemd).

Documentation? Sure, there’s lots of it. You can start with our DTrace wiki page, the DTrace for Linux page on GitHub, or the original documentation for Illumos. Enjoy!

We’re very happy to announce that Arm Ltd. and specifically its Works on Arm team has sent us a fast Ampere Altra Max server to support Gentoo development. With 96 Armv8.2+ 64bit cores, 256 GByte of RAM, and 4 TByte NVMe storage, it is now hosted together with some of our other hardware at OSU Open Source Lab. The machine will be a clear boost to our future arm64 (aarch64) and arm (32bit) support, via installation stage builds and binary packages, architecture testing of Gentoo packages, as well as our close work with upstream projects such as GCC and glibc. Thank you!