I’ve done some work with DTrace and Perl, using my Devel::DTrace::Provider and Andy Armstrong’s Devel::DTrace, but there’s never been a ustack helper: because of the structure of the Perl interpreter, it’s impossible to write one – at least, in the intended manner…

Traditionally, rolling out an X.509-style PKI has been a lot of work. You’ve got to create the CA, generate all the necessary private keys and distribute them securely, create signed certificates and distribute those, and then do it all again when renewal time comes around.

Since Chef 0.10.10, there’s been a new core resource for installing Ruby gems to support Chef cookbooks: chef_gem.

With this post I’d like to introduce libusdt, a library for creating DTrace USDT providers at runtime, intended as the basis for implementing custom DTrace providers in dynamic languages, but applicable wherever the provider definition isn’t known at compile time.