Last tuesday I gave my talk on OpenSolaris in front of an audience of 24 ÉTS students (mostly software and IT engineering). Obviously, as I was presenting at ÉTS, I had translated the OpenSolaris slideset available to campus ambassadors in French. I had also prepared a more interesting interactive demo to better show the power of DTrace, which I thought most SW Eng. students in the audience would find interesting. I had OpenSolaris installed inside a VMWare Fusion virtual machine on my Macbook Pro. I had also configured the SAMP CoolStack PHP instance (SXDE 01/08) to work with DTrace.
I started with a quick tour of the SMF, showed ZFS web management interface and then moved on to DTrace. I started with some simple DTrace examples and concluded with a pretty cool example of tracing over a PHP AJAX Web application (most of which was inspired by Brian Cantrill's examples : http://blogs.sun.com/bmc/entry/dtrace_and_php_demonstrated). I also quickly demoed Sun Studio 12's DLight with a Java Swing app (although it was pretty slow to instrument a Java app under a virtual machine...). As I expected, the students were captivated by what DTrace can do.