Announcing DTrace for Windows Insider

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Microsoft announced on its blog today that the company has added support for DTrace into its Insider builds. The forthcoming Windows 10 feature update will bring support for this debugging and diagnostic tracing tool.

The support for DTrace is now possible due to a port of the open-source OpenDTrace project. The port was announced at the Ignite conference last year. The instructions, binaries, and source code for the same are now available for Windows Insider.

DTrace lets developers and administrators track kernel function calls, examine properties of running processes, and probe drivers. The DTrace scripting language allows users to specify which information is probed, and how to report that information.

Hari Pulapaka, Microsoft group program manager for Windows kernel, says that the merge will happen over the next few months, but in the meantime, Microsoft is making its DTrace source available.

Source: Microsoft blog

To run DTrace on Windows 10, users need a 64-bit Insider build 18342 or higher, and a valid Insider account. DTrace has to be run in administrator mode. In order to expose the required functionality for DTrace, Microsoft created a new kernel extension driver, traceext.sys. However, Microsoft does not plan to open source Traceext .

You can head over to GitHub to download the source code for this project.