Brendan Gregg | |
---|---|
Born | |
Occupation(s) | Computer scientist and computer engineer |
Known for | USE method, eBPF, DTraceToolkit |
Website | www.brendangregg.com |
Brendan Gregg is a computer engineer known for his work on computing performance. He works for Intel, [1] and previously worked at Netflix, Sun Microsystems, Oracle Corporation, and Joyent. He was born in Newcastle, New South Wales and graduated from the University of Newcastle, Australia.
In November, 2013, he was awarded the LISA Outstanding Achievement Award "For contributions to the field of system administration, particularly groundbreaking work in systems performance analysis methodologies." [2] He investigates and writes about Linux performance on his blog. [3]
Gregg has developed various methodologies for performance analysis, notably the USE Method methodology (short for Utilization Saturation and Errors Method). [4]
He has also created visualization types to aid performance analysis, including latency heat maps, [5] utilization heat maps, subsecond offset heat maps, and flame graphs. [6]
His tools are included in multiple operating systems and products, and are in use by companies worldwide. He pioneered eBPF as an observability technology, [7] including authoring many advanced eBPF tracing tools to provide unique insights into system behavior. As a kernel engineer, he developed the ZFS L2ARC: A pioneering file system performance technology. He has also developed and delivered professional training courses on computer performance.
Gregg has authored hundreds of articles about systems performance and multiple technical books, including Systems Performance 2nd Edition (2020) and BPF Performance Tools (2019), both in the Addison-Wesley professional computing series. His prior books were on Solaris performance and DTrace, and were published by Prentice Hall. His books are recommended or required reading at major technology companies.
Gregg was previously known as an expert on using DTrace and the creator of the DTraceToolkit. [8] He is also the star of the Shouting in the Data Center viral video. [9]
Solaris is a proprietary Unix operating system originally developed by Sun Microsystems. After the Sun acquisition by Oracle in 2010, it was renamed Oracle Solaris.
Valgrind is a programming tool for memory debugging, memory leak detection, and profiling.
pkgsrc is a package management system for Unix-like operating systems. It was forked from the FreeBSD ports collection in 1997 as the primary package management system for NetBSD. Since then it has evolved independently; in 1999, support for Solaris was added, followed by support for other operating systems.
DTrace is a comprehensive dynamic tracing framework originally created by Sun Microsystems for troubleshooting kernel and application problems on production systems in real time. Originally developed for Solaris, it has since been released under the free Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) in OpenSolaris and its descendant illumos, and has been ported to several other Unix-like systems.
The Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) is a free and open-source software license, produced by Sun Microsystems, based on the Mozilla Public License (MPL). Files licensed under the CDDL can be combined with files licensed under other licenses, whether open source or proprietary. In 2005 the Open Source Initiative approved the license. The Free Software Foundation (FSF) considers it a free software license, but one which is incompatible with the GNU General Public License (GPL).
Bryan M. Cantrill is an American software engineer who worked at Sun Microsystems and later at Oracle Corporation following its acquisition of Sun. He left Oracle on July 25, 2010, to become the Vice President of Engineering at Joyent, transitioning to Chief Technology Officer at Joyent in April 2014, until his departure on July 31 of 2019. He is now the CTO of Oxide Computer company.
OS-level virtualization is an operating system (OS) virtualization paradigm in which the kernel allows the existence of multiple isolated user space instances, including containers, zones, virtual private servers (OpenVZ), partitions, virtual environments (VEs), virtual kernels, and jails. Such instances may look like real computers from the point of view of programs running in them. A computer program running on an ordinary operating system can see all resources of that computer. Programs running inside a container can only see the container's contents and devices assigned to the container.
Software visualization or software visualisation refers to the visualization of information of and related to software systems—either the architecture of its source code or metrics of their runtime behavior—and their development process by means of static, interactive or animated 2-D or 3-D visual representations of their structure, execution, behavior, and evolution.
In computing, SystemTap is a scripting language and tool for dynamically instrumenting running production Linux-based operating systems. System administrators can use SystemTap to extract, filter and summarize data in order to enable diagnosis of complex performance or functional problems.
Adam Leventhal is an American software engineer, and one of the three authors of DTrace, a dynamic tracing facility in Solaris 10 which allows users to observe, debug and tune system behavior in real time. Available to the public since November 2003, DTrace has since been used to find opportunities for performance improvements in production environments. Adam joined the Solaris kernel development team after graduating cum laude from Brown University in 2001 with his B.Sc. in Math and Computer Science. In 2006, Adam and his DTrace colleagues were chosen Gold winners in The Wall Street Journal's Technology Innovation Awards contest by a panel of judges representing industry as well as research and academic institutions. A year after Sun Microsystems was acquired by Oracle Corp, Leventhal announced he was leaving the company. He served as Chief Technology Officer at Delphix from 2010 to 2016.
Illumos is a partly free and open-source Unix operating system. It is based on OpenSolaris, which was based on System V Release 4 (SVR4) and the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). Illumos comprises a kernel, device drivers, system libraries, and utility software for system administration. This core is now the base for many different open-sourced Illumos distributions, in a similar way in which the Linux kernel is used in different Linux distributions.
Joyent Inc. is a software and services company based in San Francisco, California. Specializing in cloud computing, it markets infrastructure-as-a-service. On June 15, 2016, the company was acquired by Samsung Electronics.
Bufferbloat is a cause of high latency and jitter in packet-switched networks caused by excess buffering of packets. Bufferbloat can also cause packet delay variation, as well as reduce the overall network throughput. When a router or switch is configured to use excessively large buffers, even very high-speed networks can become practically unusable for many interactive applications like voice over IP (VoIP), audio streaming, online gaming, and even ordinary web browsing.
SmartOS is a free and open-source SVR4 hypervisor based on the UNIX operating system that combines OpenSolaris technology with bhyve and KVM virtualization. Its core kernel contributes to the illumos project. It features several technologies: Crossbow, DTrace, bhyve, KVM, ZFS, and Zones. Unlike other illumos distributions, SmartOS employs NetBSD pkgsrc package management. SmartOS is designed to be particularly suitable for building clouds and generating appliances. It was originally developed for and by Joyent, who announced in April 2022 that they had sold their business supporting and developing of Triton Datacenter and SmartOS to MNX Solutions. It is open-source and free for anyone to use.
ftrace is a tracing framework for the Linux kernel. Although its original name, Function Tracer, came from ftrace's ability to record information related to various function calls performed while the kernel is running, ftrace's tracing capabilities cover a much broader range of kernel's internal operations.
Performance Analyzer is a commercial utility software for software performance analysis for x86 or SPARC machines. It has both a graphical user interface and a command line interface. It is available for both Linux and Solaris operating systems. It can profile C, C++, and Java.
Michael W. Shapiro is an American computer programmer who worked in operating systems and storage at Sun Microsystems, Oracle, and EMC.
ZFS is a file system with volume management capabilities. It began as part of the Sun Microsystems Solaris operating system in 2001. Large parts of Solaris, including ZFS, were published under an open source license as OpenSolaris for around 5 years from 2005 before being placed under a closed source license when Oracle Corporation acquired Sun in 2009–2010. During 2005 to 2010, the open source version of ZFS was ported to Linux, Mac OS X and FreeBSD. In 2010, the illumos project forked a recent version of OpenSolaris, including ZFS, to continue its development as an open source project. In 2013, OpenZFS was founded to coordinate the development of open source ZFS. OpenZFS maintains and manages the core ZFS code, while organizations using ZFS maintain the specific code and validation processes required for ZFS to integrate within their systems. OpenZFS is widely used in Unix-like systems.
eBPF is a technology that can run programs in a privileged context such as the operating system kernel. It is the successor to the Berkeley Packet Filter filtering mechanism in Linux and is also used in non-networking parts of the Linux kernel as well.
USpatent 8881279B2,Brendan D. Gregg,"Systems and methods for zone-based intrusion detection",issued 2014-11-04, assigned to Joyent, Inc.
USpatent 8032708,Brendan D. Gregg, Adam H. Leventhal, Bryan M. Cantrill,"Method and system for caching data in a storage system",issued 2011-10-04, assigned to Oracle America, Inc.