Schedule 34th Chaos Communication Congress

Systems are getting increasingly complex and it's getting harder to understand what they are actually doing. Even though they are built by human individuals they often surprise us with seemingly bizarre behavior. DTrace lights a candle in the darkness that is a running production system giving us unprecedented insight into the system helping us to understand what is actually going on.

We are going implement `strace`-like functionality, trace every function call in the kernel, watch the scheduler to its thing, observer how FreeBSD manages resources and even peek into runtime systems of high level programming languages. If you ever wondered what software is doing when you are not looking, this talk is for you.

DTrace is an incredibly useful tool for safely inspecting whole systems without impacting overall performance as much as other mechanisms. It's open source and available on a wide variety of operating systems like FreeBSD, MacOS, Solaris, illumos and NetBSD. It can be used for debugging, reverse engineering or for just learning to understand the system.

I'm going to introduce DTrace and its D language by digging down into the inner workings of FreeBSD itself as it runs (e.g. memory and process management, locking infrastructure and scheduling) as well as user processes. On top of that I will use DTrace itself to illustrate how DTrace is doing its work. We are also going to take a look at some of DTraces' internals like some of the design decisions as well as the byte code that is being executed in the kernel.

Info

Day: 2017-12-28
Start time: 14:30
Duration: 00:30
Room: Saal Dijkstra
Track: Resilience
Language: en

Links:

• iCalendar
• DTrace Website

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