Read a rumor that DTrace will be in OS X Leopard

As we all know, the BSDs are having a major resurgence of late. BSD, Solaris 10 (X), OS X are of course cousins being offsprings from Bill Joy's (and other's) work.

The resurgance is due to the fact that the *.BSD community finally let go of their elitist atbreastudes. In the Free-Net-BSD the elitism was characterized by a "RTFM" demeanor towards newbies. In Solaris, it was the PC Bucket syndrome. In other words, if you weren't running a million dollar server or a 50,000 dollar workstation, you had a PC Bucket and weren't worthy of Solaris and your computing needs were "unimportant".

This changed really fast of course when Linux leapt to the scene. "BSD is dying" was a common post on many popular forums. In any article posted about a BSD , most posts would ignore the topic and instead be devoted to about its dissolution.

Of course the Linux kernel is a spaghetti ball mess, but they were open to new users during the time period of 1994-2002. They would have thousands of how-to articles posted on the net. No question was too stupid in their quest for users, nor was any user unsuitable for Linux. If you had a pulse, linux was right for you. The result was a magnificent increase in Linux market share at the expense of Unix. This is ironic in the sense that Linux is really GNU-Linux, and GNU stands for "Gnu's Not Unix".

Why is the recursive acronym "Gnu's not Unix" important to understand? Because of standards compliance. Each Unix command is designed to a standard. What options it takes, etc. all of which are carefully documented in man pages. Of course, a Linux user who has never been exposed to a real Unix machine will not understand this as the GNU-Linux manpages are shamefully bad in lacking proper documentation. When I pointed out in gnu.misc.discuss that a gnu command was not operating properly in accordance to standards and had extraneous switches which were not portable to other Unix systems I was told by a noted member of the FSF that "Gnu is not Unix". Yet the GNU-Linux community accusses others of not following standards!

Now the lack of standards which was once a user inconvenience is now affecting development of GNU-Linux itself. Reiser 4 filesystem will not be in the Linux kernel because Linus doesn't like its concept of plugins (that Reiser 4 is buggy is not his concern). This while Solaris has already released their next generation filesystem ZFS. OS X Leopard is strongly rumored to include an awesome next gen filesystem too. Even worse, what once worked on a previous kernel may not work on the next linux kernel. That kind of instability make it impossible eventually to get a solid kernel out the door.

Even worse is Linus is reaching his limit of understanding the kernel as evidenced by his mulbreastude of poor decisions. Since he is the ultimate dictator of what goes into the kernel, this in effect makes the official Linux kernel only as good as he is. Look at the BUS-ID-LUN fiasco where Linus doesn't realize that many datacenters identify which drives to swap by looking at the LUN numbers emblazed on the drives themselves as Linus tries to eliminate LUNs from the kernel.

Now that the atbreastudes of the *BSD community has shaped up users are starting to flock to it. It helps that BSD's generally solid engineering (the exception of FreeBSD 5 noted) is enabling BSD-Solaris-OS X to surpbutt Linux. Dtrace and next gen filesystems are important milestones documenting that fact.

Now that DTrace will be in OS X Leopard, and all the cool features are making it into BSD-Solaris-OS X Linux will see a faster exodus from its more knowledgeable user base. What will be left are the fanatics whose only qualification was their pulse defending the fort to the end on comp.os.linux.advocacy. This is ironic in the sense that when the BSD users were mean to newbies and told them to RTFM way back when, they actually knew what they were doing in terms of code. The fact that Linux will be one of the only Unix like operating systems lacking DTrace is evidence of the fact. And no, struts and truss are not good enough and if you think so your pulse may be what qualified you to run linux. ;-)

Here is the article discussing DTrace on OS X Leopard: