Monday 5 October 2015

Dtrace broken under El Capitan

One of the tools that I use quite a lot in debugging in 'dtrace' and the various utilities that use it.  e.g. open snoop, iotop and a few that I wrote myself.

With the GA of El Capitan, any utility that resides in a system directory cannot be traced by dtrace, which is a bit of a problem.  I was wanting to see what open system calls the Photos app was using and came across this.


I know I could have used some other Mac utilities (fs_usage, sc_usage etc.) but I'm showing my Solaris roots here and still wanted to use dtrace.


Fortunately there looks to be a way of enabling dtrace:

  1. Reboot the mac
  2. Hold ⌘R during reboot
  3. From the Utilities menu, run Terminal
  4. Enter the following command
csrutil enable --without dtrace

Note, that when doing so I got the following warning:
This is an unsupported configuration, likely to break in the future and leave your machine in an unknown state.
I'll live with it just now.
Also changed the boot delay on the VMware machine by bios.bootdelay = 20000 in the vmx file.

8 comments:

  1. I'm not sure if this is related, but dtrace probes may be renamed? iotop does not work under el capitan, failing with this message: "probe description io:::start does not match any probes"

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  2. Same issue here... heading to Apple have appointment tomorrow!

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  3. Same issue here... heading to Apple have appointment tomorrow!

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  4. hey :) any luck with the io probe?

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  5. happening again under High Sierra. Seems like I spend more time trying to get my Mac to work right than actually using it.

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  6. Did anyone ever find a fix for this?

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