30 ms·

Microsoft Releases a Linux Version of the ProcDump Sysinternals Tool

455 points by ArtWomb 8y ago

kuratkull 8y ago
I have kind of gotten used to the "New Microsoft", but not really, actions like this still blow my mind.
- OnlyRepliesToBS 8y ago
  embrace it
  - _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
    and we all know the next step.
    - 2bitencryption 8y ago
      yes, a software company releasing a software tool for Linux must surely be their first step in the grand plan to extinguish the entire marketplace! Devious, Microsoft, very devious!
      - arminiusreturns 8y ago
        If an abuser continuously abuses and then one day is kind, forgive those abused for skepticism...
      - _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
        it was more a reference to OP's phrasing than anything else. I don't think Microsoft is interested in extinguishing the Linux ecosystem at this point in time. Co-opting it, yes, but not extinguishing.
- thatsaguy 8y ago
  The "new microsoft" provides a baseline operating system riddled with spyware, an update system that takes over the control of your system and pushes random content to your drive and a closed-as-ever groupware suite. Nothing has really changed except some developer allure, which seems to be working. But I don't want to be tracked when I paid for their stuff. I want control over my system. And from a developer perspective, I'm still 1000% more productive on any nix based system where the tooling is (and has generally always been) years ahead. There are very few areas where I need to use windows, and it's only due to vendor lock-in. Embedded development tools and professional RE tools are stronger on windows, sadly.
Wistar 8y ago
Mark Russinovich is a treasure.
- tgtweak 8y ago
  CTO of azure, not a bad career path.
Yuioup 8y ago
My prediction for 2019: Microsoft announces Microsoft Linux, with many Microsoft store apps working via a compatibility layer. Office for Linux coming early 2021.
- xarope 8y ago
  MS lDOS: the New linux distro for 2019?
  - Rychard 8y ago
    Microsoft OS^2 (Open Source Operating System)
    - krylon 8y ago
      That would actually be a really awesome name!!!
- snacktaster 8y ago
  I actually thought for the longest time that they would eventually acquire red hat. But now I'm thinking it will be canonical
  - jrs95 8y ago
    Now that IBM bought Red Hat I think that would actually be good for Linux.
  - jimnotgym 8y ago
    I can imagine MS wanting control of a Linux server edition for Azure, and Canonical looks like a good target. Not least as canonical seem to have been preparing for a sale. I suppose the real question is how they will treat desktop Linux. I can imagine they would be interested in it as a development environment for their Azure Linux, but less interested in supporting it as a competitor to Windows.
  - jefurii 8y ago
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
satysin 8y ago
Microsoft do cool things like this which makes me think "oh wow they really are a different company to 15 years ago" So I go and check out a new Windows 10 laptop and the first thing I see, even on Microsoft's own Surface devices running a 'clean' Windows install, is a bunch of adverts on the start menu and sigh. FFS Microsoft. Why do you do so many great things then ruin your most popular brand with crap like Candy Crush and Twitter on your clean Windows install on your £3000+ premium laptop running Windows 10 Professional? Not to mention how you conveniently always reset my settings to your defaults including reinstalling all your ad-crap every 6 months with a new Windows release. So I have to go find that damn PowerShell script again to wipe them out because a normal uninstall option is just too much to ask for isn't it! Honestly it does my head in. Windows 10 is a solid OS but they trash it with these awful little pointless decisions. Fine stick your Candy crap in the Home edition but leave Professional alone, especially as you offer me no alternative as an independent development as I can't meet your Enterprise level requirements. Do you see Apple loading up third-party apps into macOS? No? I wonder why. Solving a lot of the complaints about Windows 10 isn't some super hard development problem. All they have to do is provide an actual clean version of Windows 10 with no third-party crap and cut out a few of the MS apps as well like 3D Paint (really?), 'Get Office' (again really? In your Professional version?), stop nagging me about changing from your own products, remove all 'suggestions' and tips, allow me to properly disable Cortana and OneDrive with a single option and they be actually gone for good, and maybe have an option to fully disable telemetry (not that I would as I know it is beneficial to you and I but it will shut up some noisy people online and makes everyone happy). See not that hard is it? Also please go to a one release per year. The fact you have screwed up the last two consecutive updates shows you are pushing to do too much too quickly. Who are you in a race with anyway? Just take your time and do a nice solid update every Spring and everyone will be much happier.
- zapzupnz 8y ago
  Being fair, the advertisements can be switched off (and Windows Setup offers this during the Out of Box Experience when the computer is first used or a major update occurs), and those icons can be removed fairly simply. Also, those third party apps aren't preinstalled; they're just shortcuts to the Microsoft Store to download them. I see a lot of people spending more energy ranting about this, a problem that doesn't necessarily exist in the way that people might think, than doing a quick investigation to find that the apps aren't there in the first place.
ilaksh 8y ago
What about all of the other companies who have built useful Linux tools over the years? Probably quite a few more useful than this. I'm sorry but I just don't believe that Microsoft is good for Linux. Although Linux has only a tiny fraction of the market, it's still one of the few competitors to Windows. They are competitors. MS does not try to help Linux out of the goodness of it's heart. They do it despite themselves or for PR or in an effort to try to mitigate Linux in some way. If possible they would like to eat Linux up, incorporate a version into Windows. This is not because they want to help Linux adoption. It's to try to keep developers, who would otherwise run Linux, inside of Windows.
- Someone1234 8y ago
  > Although Linux has only a tiny fraction of the market It has a significantly larger install-base than Windows. Which market are you referring to? My DVR runs Linux, my TV runs Linux, my phone runs Linux, heck even my car's infotainment unit runs Linux. Windows is only on PCs and Laptops these days. > They are competitors. MS does not try to help Linux out of the goodness of it's heart. Microsoft no longer views Linux as a competitor but an opportunity. They're making plenty of money off of Linux's back via Azure and SQL Server licensing. Microsoft views its future as largely in digital services. The advantage to that for them is that it isn't tied to the Windows platform, so they continue to profit when people have a mobile device or a Chromebook. > If possible they would like to eat Linux up, incorporate a version into Windows. They already have that via Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) which aside from being the worst name ever, is a full Ubuntu running in the user's context that interoperates (kinda) with Windows.
- abraae 8y ago
  That's a very personalizing argument. No, MS does not "try to help Linux out of the goodness of it's heart." (a) its a corporate - corporates don't have hearts (b) even individuals usually have an ulterior motive for their actions. Perhaps by helping Linux, we get some personal ego boost from seeing our own name on the contributor's wall. Or perhaps when Linux wins, the market for our Linux skills grows. Whatever, no-one does anything much out of the pure goodness of their hearts.
adzm 8y ago
Would be great to get ProcDump itself on GitHub as well!
edoo 8y ago
You can do the exact same with a few lines of bash and the gdb package which includes gcore, a standard utility that saves core files from running programs.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- techntoke 8y ago
  Doing things simple and fast is not the Microsoft way. The goal is to abstract everything from the user to that they become helpless and dependent on bloated interfaces.
- fulafel 8y ago
  I guess the sampling and triggering part is the idea. There's an "explain vs gcore" issue on the github, which mentions among other things that they use gcore to generate the core dumps but want to move away from it: https://github.com/Microsoft/ProcDump-for-Linux/issues/13 https://github.com/Microsoft/ProcDump-for-Linux/issues/13
  - SEJeff 8y ago
    So this is kind of more like perf, which includes sampling and triggering both?
    - fulafel 8y ago
      I don't know, pointers to relevant perf functionality would be welcome. I just looked and couldn't find an obvious way to get core dumps frpm memory or cpu usage thresholds.
userbinator 8y ago
ProcDump is a Linux reimagining of the classic ProcDump tool "reimagining"? Why the obfuscatory marketingspeak? "Linux version of the ProcDump..." would've been far clearer and more familiar. I wasn't aware Sysinternals had its own tool of similar function with the same name --- the ProcDump I know of was written by a few crackers 2 decades ago and very useful for unpacking: "ProcDump version 1.6 (C) G-RoM, Lorian & Stone in 1998, 1999, 2000"
- da_chicken 8y ago
  > "reimagining"? Why the obfuscatory marketingspeak? Probably because of significantly different functionality. ProcDump is cool because it lets you use system performance counters to trigger a dump precisely when a program is misbehaving, including when an exception occurs. The Linux version only appears to support a few options: CPU thresholds and memory commits. > the ProcDump I know of was written by a few crackers 2 decades ago That's always been ProcDump32 to me. IIRC, SysInternals' ProcDump isn't as old, but it's good for debugging transient issues with executing programs.
- Someone1234 8y ago
  > Why the obfuscatory marketingspeak? Seems like an unnecessarily hostile response. It is a re-imagining because it has very little in common with the Windows ProcDump aside from doing a very similar task and name. For example it is a brand new implementation and many of the args have changed (M/m Vs. m/ml, or p for pid Vs. p for performance counter on Windows, etc). If they called it a "Linux version of the Windows Utility" people would be complaining about that instead ("but the args aren't the same!"). So instead they call it a re-imagining and get attacks like this, it is a no-win situation.
- exikyut 8y ago
  Heh. I think it's because I just woke up, but when you said "a few crackers" I thought you meant "a few crazy people", in a nice way of course. Googling promptly cleared up that misunderstanding (although I was probably only half wrong ;) ). You're referring to ProcDump32. Googling "ProcDump32 1.6.2" seems to do the trick for finding it. References: (don't fall in :D) - http://vinaylimbare.blogspot.com/2010/ http://vinaylimbare.blogspot.com/2010/ - https://cagglararli.wordpress.com/2015/01/15/re-building/ https://cagglararli.wordpress.com/2015/01/15/re-building/ - http://karpoff.esy.es/manuales/topcite/archivos/UpxManual.html http://karpoff.esy.es/manuales/topcite/archivos/UpxManual.ht... (site says it's shutting down in 2 weeks; / is only 58MB when wget -r'd) - https://xakep.ru/2004/08/23/23546/ https://xakep.ru/2004/08/23/23546/ (a Russian article whose author completely confuses ProcDump and ProcDump32) - http://web.archive.org/web/20010721135909/http://procdump32.cjb.net:80/ http://web.archive.org/web/20010721135909/http://procdump32.... (the canonical home, but all outbound (archived) links broken) -
Hello71 8y ago
Seems like a very Windows tool. By that I mean it's a full "application" to do what could be done in about 15 lines of shell script: #!/bin/bash set -e pid=$1 if [[ "$pid" = *[^0-9]* ]]; then pid=$(pgrep -x "$pid") fi lasttime=$((2**64)) while sleep 10; do read pid comm state ppid pgrp session tty_nr tpgid flags minflt cminflt majflt cmajflt utime stime cutime cstime priority nice num_threads itrealvalue starttime vsize rss rsslim startcode endcode startstack kstkesp kstkeip signal blocked sigignore sigcatch wchan nswap cnswap exit_signal processor rt_priority policy delayacct_blkio_ticks guest_time cguest_time start_data end_data start_brk arg_start arg_end env_start env_end exit_code < /proc/$pid/stat newtime=$((utime+stime)) if (( newtime - lasttime > 1 )); then gcore $pid fi lasttime=$newtime done This one has the benefit of being extensible to handle whatever metric you want, or execute whatever command you want, change the polling period...
- WalterGR 8y ago
  Where are the command line arguments other than the pid? Where are the tests? This one has the benefit of being extensible to handle whatever metric you want, or execute whatever command you want, change the polling period... Yeah, you also have to edit it every time you want to use it. It’s a chunk of shell script, not a reusable tool.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
  Is htop very "Windows" as well?
kerng 8y ago
These Windows is really that makes Microsoft look bad. Imagine being the developer who wrote this and now the top comment is about how Windows ads and default games suck.
chappar 8y ago
Honest question. What is a typical use-case for this tool?
- yarrel 8y ago
  Bleating about how wonderful Microsoft are while they work on locking everyone in to Azure in the background.
- acdha 8y ago
  Say you have a problem which is hard to reproduce — e.g. your service gets slow in the early morning but the app-level metrics don’t show anything unusual, and maybe the problem duration is too short for someone to easily catch it in action. You could set a trigger based on CPU or memory load so e.g. the next spike will capture a few dumps over a set period of time. You don’t have to deal with a ton of data from a simple periodic trigger or having to try to time an irregular event — nothing world-changing but a nice time-saver.
qwerty456127 8y ago
What they will probably never port to Linux is the real thing that makes Windows valuable - Microsoft Office.That's exactly the thing, absence of which makes Linux "not ready for desktop" (sort of sarcasm, I use Linux on desktop happily and LibreOffice is usually enough for me but many people and companies don't just because of this). If only they would I would absolutely buy it and would be also able to replace Windows on just so many business computers with Linux.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
  I'm quite happily using Office 365 under Linux. There's no real benefit to using their desktop offering over the browser-based one these days tbh.
- filomeno 8y ago
  Of course, they're a for profit company. And I understand they will do everything they can to undermine competition. That's why I also don't buy this "new cool Microsoft" mantra.
- apexalpha 8y ago
  Try OnlyOffice! https://www.onlyoffice.com/ https://www.onlyoffice.com/
  - qwerty456127 8y ago
    Doesn't you have to run a server (or use a 3-rd party server) for this?
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
  As a Windows user who doesn't have Office installed, I disagree that Office is the only thing making Windows valuable. There are a lot of things it does right, or at least much better, than Linux, things the Linux community doesn't even seem to understand why anybody wants. Sadly, they're slowly destroying all these things because they hate the Desktop now, so the future of personal computing looks pretty damned grim.
fulafel 8y ago
Neat idea, process state sampling by uninvasive core dumps. Is the Windows version the same concept, does it produce windows minidumps or some such?
slededit 8y ago
One of the things I miss most about working for Microsoft was all the great internal tooling. There's stuff that blows away what's available on Linux. I wouldn't trade it for apt-get any day of the week but it would be nice to see a lot of it get ported.
- jaxtellerSoA 8y ago
  > One of the things I miss most about working for Microsoft was all the great internal tooling Like what? I am not trying to be snarky here. I honestly would like your feedback. From my perspective Linux is way better than Microsoft in this regard, but maybe I am just looking at/using the wrong MS tools?
  - sgc 8y ago
    It sounds like he is talking about internal tools, ie not available to the public.
  - 72deluxe 8y ago
    Here's just guessing: - Most of the tools by Sysinternals, eg. ProcessExplorer, ProcessMonitor - Tools by Nirsoft, eg. TCPView, GDIView, HeapMemView etc. - Microsoft's own tools eg. WinDbg, System Profiler, all the snap-ins for MMC - Tools for looking at system components related to COM/OLE That's just guessing, but I find I respect Windows more and more the more I learn about it. I recommend reading the Windows Internals books because it shows the amount of work that has gone into things that are overlooked often eg. NTFS (which is miles better than Apple's new APFS, which seems to get a lot of praise for unknown reasons). You can find out a lot of what is happening under the hood with Sysinternal's tools, including IPC which would be far harder to trace under Linux I believe.
    - mixmastamyk 8y ago
      The problem with Windows was never the core technology but rather policy decisions by those in charge.
  - 8y ago
ezoe 8y ago
It looks like this tool automatically/periodically dump cores when certain performance conditions(CPU, memory usage) met. I don't know but is there no equivalent tool in the entire Linux history?
- hurrrrr 8y ago
  gcore creates dumps and you could do periodic dumps via cron. But performance triggers aren't easily possible afaik.
xtrapolate 8y ago
This thread is yet another example of "you can't please all the people all of the time". This tool is a useful addition to the Linux toolbox, made freely available by Microsoft, in what would be yet another step towards embracing and supporting OSS - yet for many in this thread, that's just not good enough.
- zapzupnz 8y ago
  That's because people have weirdly unrealistic expectations when you put 'Microsoft' and 'Linux' in the same sentence. The biggest thread on this post seems to be about the prospect that Microsoft should/must/will (circle as applies) completely abandon Windows in favour of Linux, based on very little evidence, almost certainly because people don't know what to make of … well, any of it. Microsoft have been contributing to open source projects, the Linux environment, and so on for years (at least since Ballmer's left), and yet people are still coming to terms with it because it still messes with their world view — and quite rightly, too; forty-odd years of precedent in the other direction is hard to scrub from one's mind.
  - pronik 8y ago
    "Microsoft Linux" would be the most EEE thing they could do and I don't think anyone here expects that. However, it would be nice if there has been a bit less fuss about Microsoft going open-source. They should do just what everyone else does: extract useful software from your software stack, release it as free software and make the community a bit greater in doing that. Get your praise from the software you release, not from the fact that you do. (To be fair, I think Microsoft engineers are actually staying low-key and just release stuff, while the management, marketing and fan groups are talking about how great Microsoft has become for FLOSS)
- EnderMB 8y ago
  For the people that are still against Microsoft's involvement in mainstream technology, I don't think there will ever be a time where they'll accept Microsoft. That's not to say that their criticisms are unfounded. The main criticism today is around advertising and telemetry in Windows 10, and that's absolutely a problem for a professional device. There are many scummy practices still going on at Microsoft, and the disjointed nature between their divisions is plain to see. I don't mind it, because I think criticism is required to keep people/companies honest, and to drive improvement, but at this point I think a lot of people in tech will always find something to complain about in regards to Microsoft.
tiktoktek 8y ago
Clear cut struggle it looks in Opensource world.
stiglitz 8y ago
I like the tool but I'm aggravated to see that the sysinternals trope of printing BROUGHT TO YOU BY MARK RUSSINOVICH [ovich... ovich...] on every use persists. Pompous.
- beavis2 8y ago
  Can you imagine if they created, for example, core-utils?
  - wang_li 8y ago
    Yeah. That'd be awful. $ bc bc 1.06.95 Copyright 1991-1994, 1997, 1998, 2000, 2004, 2006 Free Software Foundation, Inc. This is free software with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. For details type `warranty'. ^C (interrupt) Exiting bc.
yarrel 8y ago
Microsoft need to make Windows more free, not try to enclose GNU/Linux. This is trivial to understand if you're looking at user freedom rather than just typing "yay open source! MS loves us nao!!!!" as you are nudged ever more meaningfully into the funnel for their cloud.
cal97g 8y ago
Literally the only reason they are interested in OSS/Linux is because it's gaining market share. We need to get rid of MS products in schools and in the work place, they are productivity killers.
thrownaway954 8y ago
Dont' know why they didn't use C# with .Net Core to write this.
- Someone1234 8y ago
  If I had to guess, the person who produced this likely just wasn't as familiar with C#/.Net Core. Looking at the code, there's very that wouldn't easily convert, you would need an unsafe section in C# however.
qbaqbaqba 8y ago
Thank you Microsoft.
oropolo 8y ago
Makes me wonder if the story Wired did in 2005 about Linus Torvalds joining Microsoft and making a Linux-based version of Windows could actually happen. Link to that story is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18383909 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18383909
pronik 8y ago
Adding to the Microsoft/FLOSS debate: I'm extremely cautious about their current efforts. I do not trust them. At all. I don't actually need to trust them, since I've left their ecosystem for Linux some 18 years ago and I don't have plans to go back. But there is also a user base of individuals and companies who are just more comfortable using Linux/FLOSS at the moment and this larger user group is exactly what Microsoft is after. Far too many times have I seen "Windows 10 with WSL and VSCode is a great development environment" on this very site, which from my point of view is exactly where Microsoft wants us to be, on the tipping point from Linux/Mac to Windows. They are pulling every uprising technology to their platform to make the decision to move back feasible for people and companies alike and thus stay relevant themselves. In times of IBM buying Red Hat this is something I've very anxious about. And like many others have said: Microsoft is just beginning to act like "good guys", but these five or six years aren't nearly enough to forget and forgive. I remember an OSCON keynote by Steve Yegge called "How to Ignore Marketing and Become Irrelevent in Two Easy Steps" (which is great in itself and really difficult to get by since blip.tv went down), where, among other things, he's telling the story of Bell Atlantic, which later became Verizon. The reason for the rebranding has been a study about the time period needed for people to forget about the bad (bad service, bad technology) and associate the brand with something good (upgraded service, upgraded technology). This study's answer has been "a generation", which is roughly what I would have guessed, based on several brand names stuck in my mind. I don't think I would trust Microsoft more 20 years from now, but I might not take such a hard stance on them if they don't go beyond the "embrace" phase in that time. If they do, well, that's another generation from them to outlive.
machinecoffee 8y ago
Interesting reading through the code, which looks very much like Win32.

455 points by ArtWomb 8y ago

kuratkull 8y ago

I have kind of gotten used to the "New Microsoft", but not really, actions like this still blow my mind.

OnlyRepliesToBS 8y ago
embrace it
- _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
  and we all know the next step.
  - 2bitencryption 8y ago
    yes, a software company releasing a software tool for Linux must surely be their first step in the grand plan to extinguish the entire marketplace! Devious, Microsoft, very devious!
    - arminiusreturns 8y ago
      If an abuser continuously abuses and then one day is kind, forgive those abused for skepticism...
    - _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
      it was more a reference to OP's phrasing than anything else. I don't think Microsoft is interested in extinguishing the Linux ecosystem at this point in time. Co-opting it, yes, but not extinguishing.
thatsaguy 8y ago
The "new microsoft" provides a baseline operating system riddled with spyware, an update system that takes over the control of your system and pushes random content to your drive and a closed-as-ever groupware suite. Nothing has really changed except some developer allure, which seems to be working. But I don't want to be tracked when I paid for their stuff. I want control over my system. And from a developer perspective, I'm still 1000% more productive on any nix based system where the tooling is (and has generally always been) years ahead. There are very few areas where I need to use windows, and it's only due to vendor lock-in. Embedded development tools and professional RE tools are stronger on windows, sadly.

Wistar 8y ago

Mark Russinovich is a treasure.

tgtweak 8y ago
CTO of azure, not a bad career path.

Yuioup 8y ago

My prediction for 2019: Microsoft announces Microsoft Linux, with many Microsoft store apps working via a compatibility layer. Office for Linux coming early 2021.

xarope 8y ago
MS lDOS: the New linux distro for 2019?
- Rychard 8y ago
  Microsoft OS^2 (Open Source Operating System)
  - krylon 8y ago
    That would actually be a really awesome name!!!
snacktaster 8y ago
I actually thought for the longest time that they would eventually acquire red hat. But now I'm thinking it will be canonical
- jrs95 8y ago
  Now that IBM bought Red Hat I think that would actually be good for Linux.
- jimnotgym 8y ago
  I can imagine MS wanting control of a Linux server edition for Azure, and Canonical looks like a good target. Not least as canonical seem to have been preparing for a sale. I suppose the real question is how they will treat desktop Linux. I can imagine they would be interested in it as a development environment for their Azure Linux, but less interested in supporting it as a competitor to Windows.
- jefurii 8y ago

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

satysin 8y ago

Microsoft do cool things like this which makes me think "oh wow they really are a different company to 15 years ago" So I go and check out a new Windows 10 laptop and the first thing I see, even on Microsoft's own Surface devices running a 'clean' Windows install, is a bunch of adverts on the start menu and sigh. FFS Microsoft. Why do you do so many great things then ruin your most popular brand with crap like Candy Crush and Twitter on your clean Windows install on your £3000+ premium laptop running Windows 10 Professional? Not to mention how you conveniently always reset my settings to your defaults including reinstalling all your ad-crap every 6 months with a new Windows release. So I have to go find that damn PowerShell script again to wipe them out because a normal uninstall option is just too much to ask for isn't it! Honestly it does my head in. Windows 10 is a solid OS but they trash it with these awful little pointless decisions. Fine stick your Candy crap in the Home edition but leave Professional alone, especially as you offer me no alternative as an independent development as I can't meet your Enterprise level requirements. Do you see Apple loading up third-party apps into macOS? No? I wonder why. Solving a lot of the complaints about Windows 10 isn't some super hard development problem. All they have to do is provide an actual clean version of Windows 10 with no third-party crap and cut out a few of the MS apps as well like 3D Paint (really?), 'Get Office' (again really? In your Professional version?), stop nagging me about changing from your own products, remove all 'suggestions' and tips, allow me to properly disable Cortana and OneDrive with a single option and they be actually gone for good, and maybe have an option to fully disable telemetry (not that I would as I know it is beneficial to you and I but it will shut up some noisy people online and makes everyone happy). See not that hard is it? Also please go to a one release per year. The fact you have screwed up the last two consecutive updates shows you are pushing to do too much too quickly. Who are you in a race with anyway? Just take your time and do a nice solid update every Spring and everyone will be much happier.

zapzupnz 8y ago
Being fair, the advertisements can be switched off (and Windows Setup offers this during the Out of Box Experience when the computer is first used or a major update occurs), and those icons can be removed fairly simply. Also, those third party apps aren't preinstalled; they're just shortcuts to the Microsoft Store to download them. I see a lot of people spending more energy ranting about this, a problem that doesn't necessarily exist in the way that people might think, than doing a quick investigation to find that the apps aren't there in the first place.

ilaksh 8y ago

What about all of the other companies who have built useful Linux tools over the years? Probably quite a few more useful than this. I'm sorry but I just don't believe that Microsoft is good for Linux. Although Linux has only a tiny fraction of the market, it's still one of the few competitors to Windows. They are competitors. MS does not try to help Linux out of the goodness of it's heart. They do it despite themselves or for PR or in an effort to try to mitigate Linux in some way. If possible they would like to eat Linux up, incorporate a version into Windows. This is not because they want to help Linux adoption. It's to try to keep developers, who would otherwise run Linux, inside of Windows.

Someone1234 8y ago
> Although Linux has only a tiny fraction of the market It has a significantly larger install-base than Windows. Which market are you referring to? My DVR runs Linux, my TV runs Linux, my phone runs Linux, heck even my car's infotainment unit runs Linux. Windows is only on PCs and Laptops these days. > They are competitors. MS does not try to help Linux out of the goodness of it's heart. Microsoft no longer views Linux as a competitor but an opportunity. They're making plenty of money off of Linux's back via Azure and SQL Server licensing. Microsoft views its future as largely in digital services. The advantage to that for them is that it isn't tied to the Windows platform, so they continue to profit when people have a mobile device or a Chromebook. > If possible they would like to eat Linux up, incorporate a version into Windows. They already have that via Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) which aside from being the worst name ever, is a full Ubuntu running in the user's context that interoperates (kinda) with Windows.
abraae 8y ago
That's a very personalizing argument. No, MS does not "try to help Linux out of the goodness of it's heart." (a) its a corporate - corporates don't have hearts (b) even individuals usually have an ulterior motive for their actions. Perhaps by helping Linux, we get some personal ego boost from seeing our own name on the contributor's wall. Or perhaps when Linux wins, the market for our Linux skills grows. Whatever, no-one does anything much out of the pure goodness of their hearts.

adzm 8y ago

Would be great to get ProcDump itself on GitHub as well!

edoo 8y ago

You can do the exact same with a few lines of bash and the gdb package which includes gcore, a standard utility that saves core files from running programs.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
techntoke 8y ago
Doing things simple and fast is not the Microsoft way. The goal is to abstract everything from the user to that they become helpless and dependent on bloated interfaces.
fulafel 8y ago
I guess the sampling and triggering part is the idea. There's an "explain vs gcore" issue on the github, which mentions among other things that they use gcore to generate the core dumps but want to move away from it: https://github.com/Microsoft/ProcDump-for-Linux/issues/13 https://github.com/Microsoft/ProcDump-for-Linux/issues/13
- SEJeff 8y ago
  So this is kind of more like perf, which includes sampling and triggering both?
  - fulafel 8y ago
    I don't know, pointers to relevant perf functionality would be welcome. I just looked and couldn't find an obvious way to get core dumps frpm memory or cpu usage thresholds.

userbinator 8y ago

ProcDump is a Linux reimagining of the classic ProcDump tool "reimagining"? Why the obfuscatory marketingspeak? "Linux version of the ProcDump..." would've been far clearer and more familiar. I wasn't aware Sysinternals had its own tool of similar function with the same name --- the ProcDump I know of was written by a few crackers 2 decades ago and very useful for unpacking: "ProcDump version 1.6 (C) G-RoM, Lorian & Stone in 1998, 1999, 2000"

da_chicken 8y ago
> "reimagining"? Why the obfuscatory marketingspeak? Probably because of significantly different functionality. ProcDump is cool because it lets you use system performance counters to trigger a dump precisely when a program is misbehaving, including when an exception occurs. The Linux version only appears to support a few options: CPU thresholds and memory commits. > the ProcDump I know of was written by a few crackers 2 decades ago That's always been ProcDump32 to me. IIRC, SysInternals' ProcDump isn't as old, but it's good for debugging transient issues with executing programs.
Someone1234 8y ago
> Why the obfuscatory marketingspeak? Seems like an unnecessarily hostile response. It is a re-imagining because it has very little in common with the Windows ProcDump aside from doing a very similar task and name. For example it is a brand new implementation and many of the args have changed (M/m Vs. m/ml, or p for pid Vs. p for performance counter on Windows, etc). If they called it a "Linux version of the Windows Utility" people would be complaining about that instead ("but the args aren't the same!"). So instead they call it a re-imagining and get attacks like this, it is a no-win situation.
exikyut 8y ago
Heh. I think it's because I just woke up, but when you said "a few crackers" I thought you meant "a few crazy people", in a nice way of course. Googling promptly cleared up that misunderstanding (although I was probably only half wrong ;) ). You're referring to ProcDump32. Googling "ProcDump32 1.6.2" seems to do the trick for finding it. References: (don't fall in :D) - http://vinaylimbare.blogspot.com/2010/ http://vinaylimbare.blogspot.com/2010/ - https://cagglararli.wordpress.com/2015/01/15/re-building/ https://cagglararli.wordpress.com/2015/01/15/re-building/ - http://karpoff.esy.es/manuales/topcite/archivos/UpxManual.html http://karpoff.esy.es/manuales/topcite/archivos/UpxManual.ht... (site says it's shutting down in 2 weeks; / is only 58MB when wget -r'd) - https://xakep.ru/2004/08/23/23546/ https://xakep.ru/2004/08/23/23546/ (a Russian article whose author completely confuses ProcDump and ProcDump32) - http://web.archive.org/web/20010721135909/http://procdump32.cjb.net:80/ http://web.archive.org/web/20010721135909/http://procdump32.... (the canonical home, but all outbound (archived) links broken) -

Hello71 8y ago

Seems like a very Windows tool. By that I mean it's a full "application" to do what could be done in about 15 lines of shell script: #!/bin/bash set -e pid=$1 if [[ "$pid" = *[^0-9]* ]]; then pid=$(pgrep -x "$pid") fi lasttime=$((2**64)) while sleep 10; do read pid comm state ppid pgrp session tty_nr tpgid flags minflt cminflt majflt cmajflt utime stime cutime cstime priority nice num_threads itrealvalue starttime vsize rss rsslim startcode endcode startstack kstkesp kstkeip signal blocked sigignore sigcatch wchan nswap cnswap exit_signal processor rt_priority policy delayacct_blkio_ticks guest_time cguest_time start_data end_data start_brk arg_start arg_end env_start env_end exit_code < /proc/$pid/stat newtime=$((utime+stime)) if (( newtime - lasttime > 1 )); then gcore $pid fi lasttime=$newtime done This one has the benefit of being extensible to handle whatever metric you want, or execute whatever command you want, change the polling period...

WalterGR 8y ago
Where are the command line arguments other than the pid? Where are the tests? This one has the benefit of being extensible to handle whatever metric you want, or execute whatever command you want, change the polling period... Yeah, you also have to edit it every time you want to use it. It’s a chunk of shell script, not a reusable tool.
SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
Is htop very "Windows" as well?

kerng 8y ago

These Windows is really that makes Microsoft look bad. Imagine being the developer who wrote this and now the top comment is about how Windows ads and default games suck.

chappar 8y ago

Honest question. What is a typical use-case for this tool?

yarrel 8y ago
Bleating about how wonderful Microsoft are while they work on locking everyone in to Azure in the background.
acdha 8y ago
Say you have a problem which is hard to reproduce — e.g. your service gets slow in the early morning but the app-level metrics don’t show anything unusual, and maybe the problem duration is too short for someone to easily catch it in action. You could set a trigger based on CPU or memory load so e.g. the next spike will capture a few dumps over a set period of time. You don’t have to deal with a ton of data from a simple periodic trigger or having to try to time an irregular event — nothing world-changing but a nice time-saver.

qwerty456127 8y ago

What they will probably never port to Linux is the real thing that makes Windows valuable - Microsoft Office.That's exactly the thing, absence of which makes Linux "not ready for desktop" (sort of sarcasm, I use Linux on desktop happily and LibreOffice is usually enough for me but many people and companies don't just because of this). If only they would I would absolutely buy it and would be also able to replace Windows on just so many business computers with Linux.

SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
I'm quite happily using Office 365 under Linux. There's no real benefit to using their desktop offering over the browser-based one these days tbh.
filomeno 8y ago
Of course, they're a for profit company. And I understand they will do everything they can to undermine competition. That's why I also don't buy this "new cool Microsoft" mantra.
apexalpha 8y ago
Try OnlyOffice! https://www.onlyoffice.com/ https://www.onlyoffice.com/
- qwerty456127 8y ago
  Doesn't you have to run a server (or use a 3-rd party server) for this?
AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
As a Windows user who doesn't have Office installed, I disagree that Office is the only thing making Windows valuable. There are a lot of things it does right, or at least much better, than Linux, things the Linux community doesn't even seem to understand why anybody wants. Sadly, they're slowly destroying all these things because they hate the Desktop now, so the future of personal computing looks pretty damned grim.

fulafel 8y ago

Neat idea, process state sampling by uninvasive core dumps. Is the Windows version the same concept, does it produce windows minidumps or some such?

slededit 8y ago

One of the things I miss most about working for Microsoft was all the great internal tooling. There's stuff that blows away what's available on Linux. I wouldn't trade it for apt-get any day of the week but it would be nice to see a lot of it get ported.

jaxtellerSoA 8y ago
> One of the things I miss most about working for Microsoft was all the great internal tooling Like what? I am not trying to be snarky here. I honestly would like your feedback. From my perspective Linux is way better than Microsoft in this regard, but maybe I am just looking at/using the wrong MS tools?
- sgc 8y ago
  It sounds like he is talking about internal tools, ie not available to the public.
- 72deluxe 8y ago
  Here's just guessing: - Most of the tools by Sysinternals, eg. ProcessExplorer, ProcessMonitor - Tools by Nirsoft, eg. TCPView, GDIView, HeapMemView etc. - Microsoft's own tools eg. WinDbg, System Profiler, all the snap-ins for MMC - Tools for looking at system components related to COM/OLE That's just guessing, but I find I respect Windows more and more the more I learn about it. I recommend reading the Windows Internals books because it shows the amount of work that has gone into things that are overlooked often eg. NTFS (which is miles better than Apple's new APFS, which seems to get a lot of praise for unknown reasons). You can find out a lot of what is happening under the hood with Sysinternal's tools, including IPC which would be far harder to trace under Linux I believe.
  - mixmastamyk 8y ago
    The problem with Windows was never the core technology but rather policy decisions by those in charge.
- 8y ago

ezoe 8y ago

It looks like this tool automatically/periodically dump cores when certain performance conditions(CPU, memory usage) met. I don't know but is there no equivalent tool in the entire Linux history?

hurrrrr 8y ago
gcore creates dumps and you could do periodic dumps via cron. But performance triggers aren't easily possible afaik.

xtrapolate 8y ago

This thread is yet another example of "you can't please all the people all of the time". This tool is a useful addition to the Linux toolbox, made freely available by Microsoft, in what would be yet another step towards embracing and supporting OSS - yet for many in this thread, that's just not good enough.

zapzupnz 8y ago
That's because people have weirdly unrealistic expectations when you put 'Microsoft' and 'Linux' in the same sentence. The biggest thread on this post seems to be about the prospect that Microsoft should/must/will (circle as applies) completely abandon Windows in favour of Linux, based on very little evidence, almost certainly because people don't know what to make of … well, any of it. Microsoft have been contributing to open source projects, the Linux environment, and so on for years (at least since Ballmer's left), and yet people are still coming to terms with it because it still messes with their world view — and quite rightly, too; forty-odd years of precedent in the other direction is hard to scrub from one's mind.
- pronik 8y ago
  "Microsoft Linux" would be the most EEE thing they could do and I don't think anyone here expects that. However, it would be nice if there has been a bit less fuss about Microsoft going open-source. They should do just what everyone else does: extract useful software from your software stack, release it as free software and make the community a bit greater in doing that. Get your praise from the software you release, not from the fact that you do. (To be fair, I think Microsoft engineers are actually staying low-key and just release stuff, while the management, marketing and fan groups are talking about how great Microsoft has become for FLOSS)
EnderMB 8y ago
For the people that are still against Microsoft's involvement in mainstream technology, I don't think there will ever be a time where they'll accept Microsoft. That's not to say that their criticisms are unfounded. The main criticism today is around advertising and telemetry in Windows 10, and that's absolutely a problem for a professional device. There are many scummy practices still going on at Microsoft, and the disjointed nature between their divisions is plain to see. I don't mind it, because I think criticism is required to keep people/companies honest, and to drive improvement, but at this point I think a lot of people in tech will always find something to complain about in regards to Microsoft.

tiktoktek 8y ago

Clear cut struggle it looks in Opensource world.

stiglitz 8y ago

I like the tool but I'm aggravated to see that the sysinternals trope of printing BROUGHT TO YOU BY MARK RUSSINOVICH [ovich... ovich...] on every use persists. Pompous.

beavis2 8y ago
Can you imagine if they created, for example, core-utils?
- wang_li 8y ago
  Yeah. That'd be awful. $ bc bc 1.06.95 Copyright 1991-1994, 1997, 1998, 2000, 2004, 2006 Free Software Foundation, Inc. This is free software with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. For details type `warranty'. ^C (interrupt) Exiting bc.

yarrel 8y ago

Microsoft need to make Windows more free, not try to enclose GNU/Linux. This is trivial to understand if you're looking at user freedom rather than just typing "yay open source! MS loves us nao!!!!" as you are nudged ever more meaningfully into the funnel for their cloud.

cal97g 8y ago

Literally the only reason they are interested in OSS/Linux is because it's gaining market share. We need to get rid of MS products in schools and in the work place, they are productivity killers.

thrownaway954 8y ago

Dont' know why they didn't use C# with .Net Core to write this.

Someone1234 8y ago
If I had to guess, the person who produced this likely just wasn't as familiar with C#/.Net Core. Looking at the code, there's very that wouldn't easily convert, you would need an unsafe section in C# however.

qbaqbaqba 8y ago

Thank you Microsoft.

oropolo 8y ago

Makes me wonder if the story Wired did in 2005 about Linus Torvalds joining Microsoft and making a Linux-based version of Windows could actually happen. Link to that story is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18383909 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18383909

pronik 8y ago

Adding to the Microsoft/FLOSS debate: I'm extremely cautious about their current efforts. I do not trust them. At all. I don't actually need to trust them, since I've left their ecosystem for Linux some 18 years ago and I don't have plans to go back. But there is also a user base of individuals and companies who are just more comfortable using Linux/FLOSS at the moment and this larger user group is exactly what Microsoft is after. Far too many times have I seen "Windows 10 with WSL and VSCode is a great development environment" on this very site, which from my point of view is exactly where Microsoft wants us to be, on the tipping point from Linux/Mac to Windows. They are pulling every uprising technology to their platform to make the decision to move back feasible for people and companies alike and thus stay relevant themselves. In times of IBM buying Red Hat this is something I've very anxious about. And like many others have said: Microsoft is just beginning to act like "good guys", but these five or six years aren't nearly enough to forget and forgive. I remember an OSCON keynote by Steve Yegge called "How to Ignore Marketing and Become Irrelevent in Two Easy Steps" (which is great in itself and really difficult to get by since blip.tv went down), where, among other things, he's telling the story of Bell Atlantic, which later became Verizon. The reason for the rebranding has been a study about the time period needed for people to forget about the bad (bad service, bad technology) and associate the brand with something good (upgraded service, upgraded technology). This study's answer has been "a generation", which is roughly what I would have guessed, based on several brand names stuck in my mind. I don't think I would trust Microsoft more 20 years from now, but I might not take such a hard stance on them if they don't go beyond the "embrace" phase in that time. If they do, well, that's another generation from them to outlive.

machinecoffee 8y ago

Interesting reading through the code, which looks very much like Win32.