[Mono-osx] [ANN] DTrace provider

[Andreas Färber]

Hello,

Recently initial support for DTrace has landed in SVN, including a  
'mono' provider with a couple of probes in the runtime. It is  
available by configuring with --enable-dtrace.

The probes I've added should be fairly self-describing:
ves-init-begin, ves-init-end (runtime initialization)
method-compile-begin, method-compile-end (JIT compilation)
gc-begin, gc-end (Garbage Collection)

I'm still working on a short intro with examples of how these probes  
can be used.

They work fine from the command line, but I was unsuccessful in  
getting any data displayed in Instruments. It would be great if  
someone familiar with Instruments and DTrace on OSX could have a look  
at the new provider and help with some open questions. In particular,  
does Instruments need the mono.d file installed somewhere? Also, is  
there some trick to run the dtrace tool without sudo on OSX?

Any further suggestions for probes and probe arguments as well as bug  
reports and patches are of course appreciated.

Note that the current code will be part of the Mono 2.0 source tarball  
but it was still unclear whether DTrace support can be made available  
through the official Mono.framework download. Either way, as a  
reminder, Mono 2.0 is expected to branch in mid-July.

Andreas