Archive for August, 2004
a new view into software
As Bryan has observed the past, software has a quality unique to engineering disciplines in that you can build it, but you can’t see it. DTrace changes that by opening windows into parts of the system that were previously unobservable and it does so in a way that minimally changes what you’re attempting to observe [...]
Solaris 10 top 11-20 number 15: kmdb
go to the Solaris 10 top 11-20 list for more Getting back to the business of the Solaris 10 top 11-20, Eric Schrock has written up a great piece on kmdb the new kernel-mode debugger which is newly available in Solaris Express 8/04. Check it out.
Inside Solaris Express
Since a few people in various forums have been asking about it, I thought I’d explain a little about how Solaris Express works. I know the story best from the kernel side, but keep in mind there are other parts of Solaris — Java, the X server, etc. — that have slightly different processes. In [...]
Assuaging OpenSolaris fears
While trawling through b.s.c., a comment caught my eye in this post from Glenn’s weblog: As a shareholder, I do NOT want you to “open source” solaris in its entirety (ESPECIALLY DTrace!). I want you to keep the good stuff completely sun-only, accessible only under NDA. Certainly, this echoes some of the same concern I [...]
Number 19 of 20: per-thread p-tools
go to the Solaris 10 top 11-20 list for more p-tools Since Solaris 7 we’ve included a bunch of process observability tools — the so called “p-tools”. Some of them inspect aspects of the process of the whole. For example, the pmap(1) command shows you information about a process’s mappings, their location and ancillary information [...]
DTrace spotting
This evening I was waiting for my bags in SFO (having tacked on an ultimate frisbee tournament in Portland after attending OSCON) when I noticed someone eyeing me suspiciously. “You work on DTrace, right? I was at your BOF the other night; DTrace looks great!” I had assumed he was glaring because another player had [...]