The Unix Way Episode 17. DTrace was designed at Sun in 2003 by Bryan Cantrill, Mike Shapiro and Adam Leventhal, shipped in Solaris 10 in January 2005, ported to FreeBSD by John Birrell and landed in 7.1-RELEASE on 6 January 2009; the script language was deliberately Turing-incomplete so the compiler could prove safety before loading. Linux could not adopt DTrace upstream because the GPL absorbs every licence it touches; the CDDL accepts coexistence, the GPL does not. The rebuild started from a substrate that had existed since 1992: McCanne and Jacobson's Berkeley Packet Filter. Alexei Starovoitov and Daniel Borkmann generalised it into eBPF, merged in Linux 3.18 on 7 December 2014; BCC arrived in 2015; Brendan Gregg announced bpftrace as DTrace 2.0 for Linux in October 2018, fifteen years after the original. The shape was always the same; the journey was a great deal longer.
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