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Comment by whatupmd | Hacker News Reader

This site is a great resource and I hope Brendan keeps posting amazing content.

It is interesting to see a former Solaris developer embrace Linux like this, when others seems to consider it an abomination.

It's a tremendous boon to Linux that it happened, it would have been very easy for him to transition into Illumos while with Joyent or FreeBSD at Netflix. Both already ran DTrace. He stuck with Linux and spent time making their performance tools competitive.

I love Brendan's writeups and scripts, and use them everyday multiple times a day, but he didn't "make Linux performance tools competitive".

He's spreading and making available knowledge about perf, ftrace, eBPF that would otherwise remain relegated in Linux kernel development circles. He's also contributing to bcc (a tool in the eBPF ecosystem), but his main merit in my opinion is marketing, with his books and blog (I'm using the term in positive sense).

The lack of DTrace like tools has long been a criticism of Linux. The entire BPF team deserves a lot of credit for their work, but his decision to highlight this problem and help solve it rather than move to FreeBSD likely got it into 4.9 rather than some kernel in the future.

Well it's the #1 platform, not sure how you can avoid using it. And I don't see why it would be such "abomination". Linux is still very clean imo

You avoid it by using the alternatives, the BSDs and Illumos. The post is probably comparing Gregg to Bryan Cantrill, who is very vocal about what he thinks is wrong with Linux.

Except that most server side apps run on Linux.

You are correct, but I don't see how that's relevant to the point? Am I misunderstanding you?

Windows is much more popular and has many more apps, but I can come up with a handful of reasons why I don't like it or think it is objectively worse.

They often also run on BSD and Illumos. They'd need some specific kernel function to have be difficult to port, and several of the alternatives offer Linux emulation layers for those situations.

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