Probe Creation

Unlike other providers, the profile provider creates probes dynamically on an as-needed basis. Thus, the desired profile probe might not appear in a listing of all probes (for example, by using dtrace -l -P profile) but the probe will be created when it is explicitly enabled.

On architectures that support arbitrary resolution profile probes, a time interval that is too short would cause the machine to continuously field time-based interrupts, thereby denying service on the machine. To prevent this situation, the profile provider will silently refuse to create any probe that would result in an interval of less than two hundred microseconds.